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HORIZONS 


WTV.   OF  CATJF.  TTRTUKV.  T  OS 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR: 

IRELAND 

A  CRITICAL  EXAMINATION 


HORIZONS 

A  BOOK  OF  CRITICISM 

BY  FRANCIS  HACKETT 


NEW  YORK 

B.  W.  HUEBSCH 

MCMXIX 

19  1  °\ 


COPYRIGHT  1918  BY  B.  W    HUEBSCH 
PRINTED  IN  U    S.  A. 

Published  June,  1918 
Second  printing,  January,  1919 


CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY,  7 

NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  i 

CORRECTNESS,  13 

WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS,  21 

MRS.  WHARTON'S  ART,  31 

MRS.  WHARTON'S  LIMITATIONS,  37 

THE  GENTEEL  TRADITION,  43 

A  NEW  NOVELIST,  50 

To  AMERICAN  WORKINGMEN,  57 

NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  2 

GEORGE  MEREDITH,  65 

HENRY  JAMES,  74 

THE  WAY  OF  ALL  FLESH,  83 

SAMUEL  BUTLER'S  NOTE  BOOKS,  92 

NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  3 

THE  MODERN,  101 
THE  POLITICAL  COMET,  109 
RESHAPING  THE  WORLD,  118 
MR.  WELLS  DISCOVERS  GOD,  125 
MR.  WELLS  ESPOUSES  GOD,  131 
THE  OLD  WIVES'  TALE,  139 
CLAYH  ANGER,  147 
THESE  TWAIN,  156 
GREEN  SICKNESS,  163 

NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  4 
WAR  AND  PEACE,  171 
CRIME  AND  PUNISHMENT,  178 


2130291 


DRAMA  AND  THE  THEATRE,  i 

JOHN  SYNGE,  189 
SHAW  ON  MARRIAGE,  198 
TIME  CANNOT  WITHER,  203 
THE  GOLDEN  AGE,  208 
HARRIS'S  PLAYLETS,  213 

DRAMA  AND  THE  THEATRE,  2 

SUNSHINE  COMEDY,  221 
TWENTY  YEARS  AFTER,  226 
THE  LIGHT  TOUCH,  231 
FOR  THE  ELEVENTH  TIME,  236 
THE  POPULAR  HIT,  241 
THE  NEGRO  PLAYERS,  246 

VARIA 

WHITAKER'S  ALMANACK,  253 
THE  IMITATION  OF  CHRIST,  258 
THE  SICKBED  OF  CULTURE,  263 
A  STYLIST  ON  TOUR,  268 
THE  RUPERT  BROOKE  LEGEND,  274 

POETRY 

1887-1915,  283 
VACHEL  LINDSAY,  288 
NEW  GROUND,  296 
ILLUMINATIONS,  305 

THE  WAR 

BELGIUM,  313 

PATRONIZING  THE  WAR,  320 

BEYOND  PATRIOTISM,  328 

DOMESTICATING  MARS,  337 

THE  COST  OF  PEACE,  345 

UNDER  FIRE,  353 

THE  WAYS  OF  WAR,  359 

~*HI  BOOKS  AND  PLAYS,  366 


INTRODUCTORY 

It  did  not  occur  to  me  when  I  was  writing  these 
reviews  that  they  might  ever  appear  in  a  book. 
With  one  exception  they  were  written  week  by  week, 
either  for  the  literary  review  of  The  Chicago  Eve- 
ning Post,  1908-1911,  or  for  The  New  Republic 
1914-1918;  and  most  of  them  were  written  about 
current  productions,  books  or  plays.  When  I  left 
Chicago  in  1911,  I  thought,  indeed,  that  I  had  done 
with  book  reviewing.  I  had  slipped  into  the  trade 
without  any  apprenticeship,  drawn  by  love  of  it;  and 
I  left  it  because  it  seemed  like  writing  in  water.  But 
one's  past  is  the  parent  of  one's  future;  I  returned 
to  it  in  1914.  When  it  was  suggested  to  me  that 
these  reviews  be  reprinted  I  felt  ashamed  of  them 
and  wanted  to  rewrite  them.  They  had  been  pre- 
pared at  the  moment  for  the  moment,  and  I  had  the 
pleasant  illusion  that  I  could  do  better.  But  why, 
after  all,  I  said  to  myself,  should  I  long  to  come 
forward  in  full  dress  when  it  was  my  habit  to  go 
around  in  a  tennis  shirt?  And  so  these  reviews  are 
reprinted  with  not  twenty  words  changed. 

My  reason  for  not  changing  them  is  the  obvious 
one  that  no  revision  could  alter  their  character  as 
plain  field  notes  of  criticism.  The  deeper  criticism, 
as  I  see  it,  is  managed  in  a  different  way.  Far 
from  being  a  dead  art,  as  the  professors  so  often 

[  7  ] 


mistake  it,  it  is  an  art  of  the  living  world  and  the 
living  age,  not  less  generous  and  sanguine  because 
wise  —  but  it  does  deviate  from  the  common  notion 
of  spontaneity  by  considering  principles  rather  than 
particular  instances.  If  there  is  a  study  of  pathol- 
ogy, for  example,  beyond  and  above  the  work  of  the 
general  practitioner,  there  is  also  a  study  of  criticism 
beyond  and  above  the  work  of  the  reviewer,  and 
the  passion  of  the  critic  is  not  less  real  because  less 
immediate.  His  is  the  kind  of  passion,  generaliz- 
ing from  living  particulars,  that  really  molds  the 
perception  of  an  epoch.  It  calls  for  work  spaciously 
planned  and  bravely  carried  on,  with  every  art  to 
serve  it  and  its  sights  set  for  posterity.  Its  aspira- 
tion far  surpasses  the  aspiration  of  the  reviewer;  it 
mingles  with  the  schemes  of  statesmen  and  the 
dreams  of  poets.  I  understand  and  respect  this 
work  too  well  to  confuse  my  own  with  it,  or  to  wish 
any  one  to  mistake  my  intention. 

But  I  do  not  propose,  on  this  account,  to  defer 
to  the  current  American  superstition  that  pedantry 
is  the  equivalent  of  ideas.  To  quote  Simon  Gry- 
naeus's  preface  to  the  Lyons  Plato  of  1548  may  be 
the  clinching  blow  of  an  argument;  it  may  also  be, 
it  is  much  more  likely  to  be,  a  bit  of  portentous 
nonsense.  A  critic  should  be  a  linguist,  a  philolo- 
gist, a  psychologist,  a  man  who  knows  literary  and 
aesthetic  ideas  as  well  as  history,  social  and  economic 
and  political:  but  all  of  it  is  cold  inanimation  un- 
less the  flame  of  sympathy  is  touched  to  it.  Criti- 
cism is  an  art  limited  by  the  capacity  of  the  critic 
for  emotion.  Without  rapport,  there  can  be  no 
criticism.  In  the  newspaper  world  it  is  unnecessary 
to  say  this.  In  the  newspaper  world  the  clown  is 

[8] 


supposed  to  be  as  close  to  the  marvel  of  Cleopatra 
as  Antony  himself.  The  newspapers  look  on  the 
critical  as  persons  who  are  unable  to  take  a  gener- 
ous attitude  toward  life,  puny  persons,  persons  who 
fancy  themselves,  persons  thin-blooded  and  finespun. 
They  represent  their  own  patrons  as  rugged,  power- 
ful, straightforward,  good  red  blood  in  their  veins. 
Silly  as  it  is  to  have  the  herd  traits  exalted  and 
imposed  in  this  fashion,  the  contrary  superstition  of 
exclusiveness  is  more  serious.  My  objection  to  the 
pedant  is  not  based  on  the  fact  that  he  is  excluding, 
but  that  his  exclusiveness  is  cold,  snobbish,  sterile. 
If  anything  is  clear  in  the  history  of  men  it  is  their 
pretentiousness.  Prophets  and  kings  and  priests 
and  judges,  the  guise  of  authority  is  myriad,  its 
deceits  multitudinous.  To  challenge  authority  may 
not  be  the  last  step  toward  liberty,  but  it  is  the  first 
step,  the  step  most  disputed,  the  step  most  needed 
in  dealing  with  reputable  American  criticism. 

When  literary  demagogues  appear,  one  must  be 
prepared  to  resist  them,  but  not  at  the  cost  of  vitality 
that  our  professors  of  English  literature  have  de- 
creed. Whether  or  not  the  cause  of  the  professors' 
feebleness  is  a  buried  "  inferiority  complex,"  as  the 
analysts  term  it,  the  fact  is  patent;  they  do  not 
savor  the  wine  of  literature  until  they  see  the  ortho- 
dox date  and  the  orthodox  name  on  the  orthodox 
cobwebbed  bottle.  Our  universities  are  crowded 
with  such  teachers.  They  do  not  arouse  and  foster 
the  feeling  for  literature,  they  thwart  and  kill  it, 
and  they  have  made  the  American  college  graduate 
a  by-word  for  literary  insensitiveness. 

One  of  the  great  army  of  American  newspaper 
book  reviewers,  my  own  aim  has  been  to  report  the 

[9] 


emotions  with  which  I  have  pursued  my  enterprise. 
The  word  emotion,  I  dare  say,  is  suspect.  Seeing 
what  great  cities  are,  and  the  havoc  they  play  with 
attention  and  susceptibility,  it  cannot  be  denied  that 
the  quality  of  aesthetic  judgment  is  subject  to  all 
sorts  of  contortion;  and  there  are  many  elements 
which  stimulate  feeling  which  do  not  reside  in  the 
thing  "  itself."  But  however  close  one  may  be  to 
the  attenuated  and  denatured,  the  persons  whose 
brains  twitter  in  their  skulls  when  taxed  by  any 
genuine  effort,  it  is  part  of  the  task  of  criticism  to 
keep  independent,  and  the  measure  of  my  useful- 
ness must  be  the  degree  to  which  my  impressions 
are  my  own.  If  I  sympathize  with  novelties,  it  is 
not  for  the  sake  of  excitation,  not  for  love  of  black 
flowers  and  green  suns.  It  is  because  our  age  is 
once  more  a  renaissance.  The  old  Mother  had 
her  wisdom  deep  and  disregarded;  but  she  was  an 
exacting  Mother,  peremptory,  greedy,  intrusive, 
anti-everything,  and  I  am  one  of  those  who  think 
she  was  only  a  step-mother  in  the  mansion  of  life. 
I  see  back  of  her,  in  her  creaking  vestments,  an 
older  creature  with  wild  eyes  and  scrabbling  hands 
and  battered  dugs,  a  naked  old  thing  called  Nature 
who  really  bore  me  and  who  had  been  demeaned 
by  this  insolent  intruder.  Our  renaissance  promises 
to  be  a  new  understanding  of  nature,  outside  priests 
and  kings  and  pedants.  If  I  have  caught  any  accent 
of  it,  I  am  fortunate.  There  can  be  no  wise  criti- 
cism that  is  unaware  of  the  new  world  in  travail. 


[  10] 


CORRECTNESS 

To  the  readers  of  The  New  York  Nation  Mr. 
Sherman's  name  is  familiar  as  one  of  the  few  serious 
literary  critics  in  the  country.  The  articles  in  this 
volume  have  all  appeared  in  The  Nation,  contributed 
from  the  professorial  realm  of  Urbana,  Illinois. 
How  Urbana  manages  to  keep  Mr.  Sherman  is  an 
academic  mystery;  but  now  that  he  has  shown  the 
amazing  difference  between  words  printed  in  a  peri- 
odical and  words  collected  in  a  book,  the  eyes  of  uni- 
versity trustees  elsewhere  ought  to  be  wheeled  upon 
him,  and  Urbana  compelled  to  guard  or  to  yield. 
Certainly  few  American  university  trustees  can  know 
their  own  business  if  they  neglect  a  professor  who 
does  so  well  the  thing  that  they  most  admire. 

The  essence  of  Mr.  Sherman's  criticism  is  Ameri- 
can correctness,  that  bloodless  correctness  to  which 
New  England  has  given  its  wintry  favor.  Mr.  Sher- 
man is  himself  an  lowan,  but  he  breathes  New  Eng- 
land and  there  is  nothing  of  Iowa  about  him.  He  is 
a  man  of  mind,  grave,  responsible  and  careful,  never 
guilty  of  that  exuberance  which  is  so  incompatible 
with  a  full  considerateness,  and  determined  not  to 
bring  forth  any  more  ideas  than  he  can  perfectly 
pasteurize.  But  he  is  not  wholly  in  a  mould.  An 
accomplished  exponent  of  the  native  moralism,  he 
does  more  than  preserve  his  fine  thin  narrow  preoc- 
cupation with  righteousness.  He  insists  on  it,  as 

On  Contemporary  Literature,  by  Stuart  P.  Sherman.     Holt,  New 
York. 

[    13   ] 


part  of  a  grand  counter-revolution,  not  only  in  his 
peregrinations  through  the  unwholesome  modernists, 
but  also  through  the  vulgar  democracy  of  Mark 
Twain,  the  continent  art  of  Arnold  Bennett,  the  tol- 
erated liberalism  of  Anatole  France,  the  sunken 
laughter  of  John  Synge,  the  "  aesthetic  idealism  "  of 
Henry  James,  the  "  humanism  "  of  George  Mere- 
dith —  until  he  relaxes  cautiously  in  the  end,  safe  in 
the  arms  of  Shakespeare.  It  is  correctness  rampant 
j  that  makes  Mr.  Sherman's  crest  different  from  the 
ordinary  heraldry;  and  the  main  delectation  of  his 
book  is  its  conservative  call  to  arms. 

What  is  the  issue?  To  Mr.  Sherman  himself  it 
seems  that  it  is  the  same  great  issue  which  underlies 
the  war.  If  we  are  fighting  the  Germans  because 
they  have  broken  treaties  and  scouted  honor  and  dis- 
regarded humanity,  then  we  must  also  repudiate  and 
cast  out  those  mechanistic,  monistic,  scientific  "  nat- 
uralists "  who  have  the  same  immorality  as  the  Ger- 
mans. The  dragon  of  naturalism  has  drawn  his 
filthy  trail  across  our  literature.  We  must  slay  the 
dragon.  H.  G.  Wells,  Theodore  Dreiser,  George 
Moore,  even  John  Dewey,  do  not  recognize  certain 
rights  and  principles,  but  "  humanity  does  after  all 
recognize  certain  rights  and  principles  as  fixed  and 
established,"  and  therefore,  by  St.  George,  we  must 
draw  the  shining  sword.  As  Mr.  Sherman  sums  it 
up,  "  the  victory  of  the  Allies  should  logically  be  re- 
flected in  a  literature  exalting  the  vindicated  '  law 
for  man.'  Haunted  by  memories  of  the  fiery  ruin 
wrought  by  those  who  made  lust  and  law  alike  in 
their  decree,  it  should  not  seek  in  nature  for  the 
order,  stability,  justice,  gentleness,  and  wisdom  that 
only  man  has  ever  desired  or  sought  to  create.  It 

[  14  J 


should  mirror  a  society  more  regardful  of  its  ascer- 
tained values,  more  reverent  of  its  fine  traditions, 
more  reluctant  to  take  up  with  the  notions  of  windy 
innovators.  It  should,  in  short,  suggest  in  its  own 
subtle  way  the  desirability  of  continuing  to  work  out 
in  the  world  that  ideal  pattern  which  lies  in  the  in- 
structed and  disciplined  heart." 

This,  we  may  take  it,  is  a  cri  de  coeur.  Litera- 
ture has  suffered  from  the  libertines,  and  literature, 
"  in  its  own  subtle  way,"  must  make  amends  by  lift- 
ing us  to  a  higher  plane.  As  against  the  practices 
of  those  naturalists  who  would  bring  us  to  the  level 
of  the  Germans  it  must,  in  the  end,  edify. 

One  might  linger  among  the  details  of  Mr.  Sher- 
man's conservatism.  If  he  is  setting  out  to  show 
that  "  the  old  moral  abstractions  "  mean  nothing  to 
Germany,  for  example,  he  has  his  work  cut  out  for 
him.  The  odium  of  scientific  monism  may  be  at- 
tached to  certain  ruthless  Germans,  especially  Ger- 
man legalists,  but  you  cannot  start  out  to  annex 
such  a  convenient  equipment  as  the  old  moral  ab- 
stractions without  hearing  a  loud  squawk  from  the 
Kaiser.  The  trouble  is,  Mr.  Sherman's  counter- 
revolution has  in  it  a  preposterous  amount  of  that 
German  specialty,  "  instinctive  obedience  " ;  and,  as 
he  says  himself,  "  we  have  trusted  our  instincts  long 
enough  to  sound  the  depths  of  their  treacherous-, 
ness."  But  the  fact  that  German  junkers  hate 
"  windy  innovators  "  quite  as  much  as  Mr.  Sher-! 
man  does,  and  that  official  Germany  equally  adores 
the  "  ideal  pattern,"  does  not  go  to  the  heart  of  the 
matter.  The  heart  of  the  matter,  so  far  as  under- 
standing Mr.  Sherman  is  concerned,  does  seem  to  be 
in  recognizing  his  profound  conviction  that  life  i§ 


in  no  sense  an  experiment,  is  in  reality  an  ingenious 
examination  paper  set  by  God  in  conjunction  with 
Matthew  Arnold.  "  Stemming  the  tide  of  natural 
impulse  " —  that  is  one  great  way  to  reach  the  right 
solution.  Also  believing  that  "  society  is  in  great 
part  an  organized  opposition  to  nature."  The  high 
principle  is  Arthurian  self-control. 

It  is  a  permanent  question,  this  one  of  the  liber- 
tinism of  all  radicals,  the  morality  of  all  stand-pat- 
ters. But  where  G.  K.  Chesterton  has  proved  him- 
self an  artist  in  the  ways  of  counter-revolution  is  in 
his  public  espousal  of  beer.  By  establishing  his  re- 
lationship with  Falstaff,  by  talking  like  an  obstreper- 
ous brewery-drayman,  Mr.  Chesterton  has  left  no 
doubt  that  when  he  says  "  restraint "  there  is  ac- 
tually something  to  restrain.  If  Mr.  Chesterton 
were  to  say,  "  It  is  of  the  essence  of  a  man  to  lay 
down  his  life  out  of  reverence  for  his  great-grand- 
father," you  would  feel  that  he  was  incurably  roman- 
tic and  would  hope  that  his  wife  and  family  could 
keep  him  from  being  hurt.  But  when  Mr.  Sherman 
says  it,  and  he  does  say  it,  you  feel  not  altogether  se- 
rious. No  one  ought  to  have  a  great-grandfather 
fit  to  mention  in  either  Iowa  or  Illinois.  And  when 
Mr.  Sherman  talks  of  restraint,  you  contemplate  his 
one  terrific  outburst  of  violence,  "  If  I  may  be  par- 
doned a  violent  expression,  Mr.  Wells  would  like 
to  slay  all  the  Victorians."  Restraint,  on  these  pure 
lips,  implies  something  that  the  intoxicated  Gilbert 
did  not  intend.  You  feel  at  once  that  it  is  something 
you  have,  not  something  he  himself  has,  that  Mr. 
Sherman  wants  to  restrain.  Yours,  of  course,  is  the 
tide  of  natural  impulse  that  he  is  longing  to  stem. 

And  so  we  find  it.  He  admires  Mark  Twain, 
[16] 


feels  like  explaining  the  great  barbarian  to  the  "  sav- 
ing remnant,"  rejoices  in  his  "  domestic  rectitude  and 
common  morality,"  but  he  is  queasy  about  Mark 
Twain's  "  savory  earthiness,"  "  golden  mediocri- 
ties," "  undisciplined  strength."  He  sees  Mark 
Twain  as  reckless,  prodigal,  garrulous,  uproarious, 
nai've,  homely,  arrogantly  candid,  impudent,  not  fine, 
not  profound,  "  not  a  drop  of  the  aristocrat  in  his 
veins."  He  yearns  in  connection  with  Mark  Twain 
toward  "  the  discipline  of  an  older  and  firmly  strati- 
fied society."  It  may  not  seem  a  grudging  refer- 
ence, but  the  fact  that  Mark  Twain  ridiculed  pure 
art  like  Jane  Austen  and  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield 
sticks  endlessly  in  his  teacher's  crop,  and  he  actually 
dares  to  dismiss  masterpieces  like  Tom  Sawyer  and 
Huckleberry  Finn  as  "  almost  entirely  delightful." 
It  is  the  intimidation  of  another  positive  vitality 
that  impairs  H.  G.  Wells  for  Mr.  Sherman.  He 
likens  Wells  to  Rousseau,  to  the  godless  Shelley. 
He  blames  him  for  irregularity.  He  calls  him  a 
"  zoological  moralist  "  because  Wells  does  not  see 
that  "  in  the  course  of  some  thousands  of  years  of 
civilized  society  the  elementary  principles  of  con- 
duct have  been  adequately  tested,  and  are  now  to  be 
unequivocally  accepted.  They  constitute  a  standard 
of  '  right  reason  '  outside  themselves,  to  which  we 
should  vigorously  subject  our  treacherous  individual 
sensibilities."  And,  if  you  please,  Mr.  Sherman  re- 
calls the  cant  that  training  in  the  sciences  leaves 
"  the  moral  nature  undisciplined  and  inclined  to  ca- 
price and  eccentricity,"  as  if  Darwin,  Huxley,  Lyell, 
Tyndall,  had  not  shown  the  world,  precisely  in  the 
sphere  of  moral  nature,  what  magnificent  beings 
English  scientists  could  be.  This  miserable  little 

E  i7  ] 


slander  is  on  a  par  with  identifying  H.  G.  Wells's 
advocacy  of  "  efficiency "  with  the  Belgic  "  effi- 
ciency "  of  Germany,  classing  Mr.  Wells  with  ruth- 
less "  imperially-minded  men."  You  might  as  well 
say  that  Benjamin  Franklin  was  a  Prussian  because 
he  favored  punctuality,  or  that  Mrs.  Bill  Jones  is  a 
materialist  because  she  employs  a  carpet-sweeper. 
And,  indeed,  when  one  explores  the  prejudice  against 
"  naturalism,"  when  one  sees  the  humble  pot-boilers 
of  Arnold  Bennett  hailed  as  rare  sanity  and  sobriety, 
there  is  almost  no  argument  that  does  not  seem  pos- 
sible in  this  battle  against  fearful  odds. 

But  the  supreme  perversion  in  Mr.  Sherman's 
book  is  too  full  of  savory  heavenliness  not  to  be 
quoted.  It  is  his  exhibit  in  the  case  of  The  Brook 
Kerith's  indecency. 

"  It  is  shortly  after  the  descent  from  the  cross 
and  during  the  convalescence  that  the  following  con- 
versation takes  place : 

" '  Joseph  asked,  not  because  he  was  interested  in  dog 
breeding,  but  to  make  talk,  if  the  puppies  were  mongrels. 
Mongrels,  Jesus  repeated  overlooking  them;  not  altogether 
mongrels,  three-quarter  bred ;  the  dog  that  begot  them  was  a 
mongrel,  half-Syrian,  half  Tracian.  I've  seen  worse  dogs 
highly  prized.  Send  the  bitch  to  a  dog  of  pure  Tracian 
stock  and  thou'lt  get  some  puppies  that  will  be  the  sort  that 
I  used  to  seek.' 

"  This  is  not  the  most  nor  the  least  quotable  of 
the  innumerable  passages  by  which  our  ingenious 
author  gives  to  his  narrative  a  kind  of  sex-interest 
in  which  the  gospel  story  is  quite  deficient." 

A  clearer  example  of  pruriency  it  would  be  hard 
to  find.  "  We  of  the  English  race,"  as  Mr,  Sher- 

[  18  ] 


man  puts  it,  may  be  quite  right  to  "  resist  Moore  — 
though  he  is  a  pretty  writer  —  to  save  Shakespeare, 
whom,  on  the  whole,  year  in  and  year  out,  we  pre- 
fer." But  'granted  that  there  is  a  sinister  move- 
ment on  foot  to  dethrone  Shakespeare  in  favor  of 
George  Moore,  and  that  Moore  ought  to  be  hero- 
ically resisted  by  "  us  of  the  English  race,"  still  when 
Moore  wanted  to  refer  to  sex  he  never  did  fall  back 
on  so  quaint  a  subterfuge  as  hinting  that  Jesus  knew 
a  little  about  breeding  dogs. 

As  between  low  vitality  and  high  vitality  there  is 
no  reason  why  high  vitality  should  be  a  bully's.  H. 
G.  Wells  and  Theodore  Dreiser  are  by  no  means  ex- 
quisitely sensitive  to  the  rights  that  they  depict  as 
betrayed.  But  this  business  of  "  stemming  the  tide 
of  natural  impulse  "  converts  a  critic  into  a  nursery- 
maid, and  puts  men  of  genius  in  a  perambulator  that 
is  several  sizes  too  small.  Mr.  Sherman  calls  him- 
self a  humanist.  He  thinks  Mr.  Wells  is  a  dan- 
gerous faun  and  Mr.  Dreiser  a  satyr  and  Mr. 
Moore  a  half-animal  of  obscene  ways.  But  what 
he  really  resents  in  these  men  is  their  irregular  in- 
sistence on  "  treacherous  individual  sensibilities." 
They  have  disregarded  what  he  considers  "  the  first 
duty  of  man,  which  is  to  perpetuate  in  and  through 
himself  the  moral  life  of  the  race." 

Is  the  criterion  of  that  moral  life  to  be  Mr.  Sher- 
man's correctness,  and  is  any  such  correctness  the 
proper  touchstone  of  art?  Not  even  his  measured 
praise  of  George  Meredith  and  his  sensitive  appreci- 
ation of  Henry  James  can  buttress  such  egregious 
rules.  It  might  be  an  excellent  thing  for  the  United 
States  if  a  clear  division  were  made  between  the 
sheep  and  the  goats  of  criticism.  On  the  side  of 


the  sheep,  as  Mr.  Sherman  sees  it,  there  would  be 
a  collection  of  eminent  names  —  Paul  Elmer  More, 
W.  C.  Brownell,  Professor  Babbitt;  and,  I  suppose, 
Brander  Matthews,  Barrett  Wendell  and  Mr.  Sher- 
man. But  before  this  division  can  be  accepted, 
with  all  the  eternal  verities  falling  on  the  side  of  the 
sheep,  Mr.  Sherman  must  do  better  in  the  way  of 
an  offensive  than  disapproving  of  contemporary 
vitality.  When  Shakespeare  was  contemporary,  the 
mandarins  frowned  on  him.  When  George  Mere- 
dith first  appeared  he  was  hounded.  It  took  Mark 
Twain  a  generation  to  get  the  slightest  professorial 
recognition.  With  such  examples  of  timidity,  why 
counsel  timidity?  Mr.  Sherman  preaches  a  forlorn 
gospel  when  he  begs  us  to  cower  behind  the  moral 
life  of  the  race  to  peer  at  art. 

January  12,  1918. 


[20] 


A  CRITICAL  study  of  William  Dean  Howells 
is  needed  in  America.  Mr.  Harvey  thinks  that  the 
lack  of  it  is  due  to  British  literary  superstition.  Mr. 
Howells,  he  believes,  has  not  been  highly,  or  highly 
enough,  esteemed  in  London,  and  the  English 
underestimation  has  been  slavishly  adopted  here. 
Whether  this  is  the  true  cause  or  not,  the  fact  is  in- 
disputable. The  most  eminent  man  of  letters  in  the 
United  States  is  not  half  so  well  established  in  the 
literary  consciousness  of  our  present  generation  as 
any  one  of  a  dozen  Englishmen. 

American  criticism,  such  as  it  is,  has  done  very 
little  for  our  leading  novelist.  There  are  Conti- 
nental writers,  indeed,  thanks  partly  to  Mr.  Howells 
himself,  whose  work  and  whose  personality  arouse 
a  desire  that  is  incommensurably  greater  than  the 
desire  which  he  arouses.  For  all  the  exciting  lit- 
erary recommendation  that  is  so  common  in  America 
the  tone  about  Mr.  Howells,  with  a  few  thrilling  ex- 
ceptions, is  exceedingly  mild.  He  is  installed  in 
good  repute.  He  is  circulated.  He  is  eulogized. 
He  is  honored.  But  he  is  not  treated  as  a  positive 
living  force.  The  reasons  for  this,  considering  his 
eminence,  are  worth  inquiry,  since  American  criti- 
cism has  long  owed  it  to  his  genius  to  do  something 
toward  breaking  up  its  merely  ceremonial  attitude. 

William  Dean  Howells,  by  Alexander  Harvey.    Huebsch,  New 
York. 

[21    ] 


Clever  and  admiring  as  Mr.  Harvey's  book  is, 
it  does  not  satisfactorily  avail  itself  of  the  oppor- 
tunity that  William  Dean  Howells  afforded.  Mr. 
Harvey  selects  important  aspects  of  Mr.  Howells's 
work  for  lively  and  assertive  advocacy,  but  it  is 
abundantly  clear  from  the  start  that  Mr.  Howells 
is  a  point  of  departure  rather  than  a  goal.  Like  a 
caged  canary  that  catches  a  sound  only  to  burst  into 
his  own  song,  Mr.  Harvey  listens  to  Howells  only 
to  break  forth  about  the  Philistinism  of  Boston,  the 
frustration  of  Charles  Francis  Adams,  the  erotic 
symbolism  of  Edgar  Allan  Poe.  It  makes  a  sug- 
gestive book,  but  it  neglects  the  case  in  point.  An 
arduous  task  confronted  Mr.  Harvey.  There  were 
not  only  the  thirty-odd  novels  to  consider,  but  farces 
and  comedies  and  books  of  travel  and  criticism  and 
reminiscence  making  a  total  of  nearly  a  hundred 
volumes,  all  coming  from  a  man  whose  recollection 
spans  half  the  life  of  the  Republic.  There  was  a 
critical  study  to  be  made  not  only  of  the  production 
that  Mr.  Howells  has  achieved,  but  of  the  national 
substance  from  which  it  came.  It  must  be  said  that 
in  being  loosely  oracular  and  discursive,  instead  of 
attentive,  Mr.  Harvey  has  missed  his  hour. 

The  special  nature  of  woman  seems  to  be  a  sub- 
ject of  compelling  interest  to  Mr.  Harvey,  for 
example,  and  he  insists  on  looking  to  Mr.  Howells's 
novels  for  a  satisfaction  of  this  proclivity.  But  Mr. 
Howells  is  the  wrong  person  for  a  man  with  such 
an  objective.  It  is  like  going  to  Chicago  for  the 
lotos.  There  is  something  to  be  said  for  the  con- 
tention that,  "  from  the  standpoint  of  literature  re- 
garded as  a  fine  art,  I  consider  The  Rise  of  Silas 
Lapham  the  greatest  novel  ever  written.  ...  In 

[  22  ] 


the  matter  of  form,  structure,  style,  whatever  we 
choose  to  call  that  part  of  the  novelist's  equipment 
which  reveals  him  as  an  artist,  this  tale  of  the  Lap- 
hams  is  more  finished  than  the  masterpieces  of  Flau- 
bert." But  there  is  very  little  to  be  said  for  the 
violent  contention  that  "  it  is  a  tale  of  the  love  of 
Irene  for  Tom  and  of  Tom  for  Penelope,  every  de- 
velopment of  the  plot  being  critical  to  us  because  it 
bears,  in  a  manner  near  or  remote,  upon  that  in- 
tense affair.  I  have  been  unable  to  call  to  mind  a 
novel  in  which  the  sentiment,  indeed  the  passion  of 
love  has  been  steeped  in  so  unsparing  a  realism  with 
such  an  intimate  knowledge  of  the  subject  matter. 
.  .  .  The  most  remarkable  feature  of  The  Rise  of 
Silas  Lapham  is  that  it  has  two  heroines." 

Is  Mr.  Harvey  entirely  sincere  in  proffering  this 
novel  as  another  Romeo  and  Juliet?  It  has  the  in- 
tense interest  of  Tom  and  Irene  and  Penelope. 
The  unmerited  misery  of  Irene  and  of  Penelope,  the 
fire  underneath  such  a  simple  phrase  as,  "  Penelope 
Lapham,  have  you  been  such  a  ninny  as  to  send  that 
man  away  on  my  account?  " —  these  things  do  make 
it  a  passionately  human  love  story.  But  "  the  mys- 
tery of  pain  and  loss  "  is  in  nowise  confined  to  the 
girls.  Mrs.  Lapham  "  had  never  heard  of  the  fate 
that  was  once  supposed  to  appoint  the  sorrows  of 
men  irrespective  of  their  blamelessness  or  blame, 
before  the  time  when  it  came  to  be  believed  that  sor- 
rows were  penalties;  but  in  her  simple  way  she  rec- 
ognized something  like  that  mythic  power  when  she 
rose  from  her  struggle  with  the  problem,  and  said 
aloud  to  herself,  '  Well,  the  witch  is  in  it.'  '  That 
fate  afflicts  Silas  as  well  as  Irene,  and  in  the  rise 
and  fall  of  Silas  Lapham,  in  his  promotion  to  pros- 

[23  ] 


parity,  in  his  collision  with  a  different  order  of  civili- 
ties, there  is  an  epic  which  is  subsidiary  to  nothing 
else.  So  accurate  is  the  delineation  of  Back  Bay 
that  impatient  Bostonians  say:  "  But  we  know  all 
that."  It  is  the  main  achievement  of  this  novel  that 
it  drives  us  to  realize  the  inexorable  necessity  and  the 
equally  inexorable  cruelty  of  exclusiveness,  social  and 
sexual,  in  direct  proportion  as  we  have  imagination. 
If  we  suppose  that  the  statement  of  these  cruel  neces- 
sities is  a  matter  of  no  moment  to  Mr.  Howells  and 
comes  from  a  juxtaposition  caught  by  the  accident  of 
the  camera,  we  naturally  conclude  that  The  Rise  of 
Silas  Lapham  is  merely  a  bit  of  skillful  representa- 
tion and  we  have  no  emotions  about  it  except  for  its 
virtuosity.  But  such  a  supposition  of  detachment  is 
too  naive.  Silas  Lapham  is  alpine  with  the  inflec- 
tions its  author  has  given  it. 

It  is  a  great  novel  especially,  as  Mr.  Harvey  says, 
because  of  the  relevancy  of  its  material,  the  aesthetic 
consequence  of  its  arrangement.  Take  any  little 
passage  like  this:  "  Penelope  began  hastily  to 
amend  the  disarray  of  her  hair,  which  she  tumbled 
into  a  mass  on  the  top  of  her  little  head,  setting  off 
the  pale  dark  of  her  complexion  with  a  flash  of  crim- 
son ribbon  at  her  throat.  She  moved  across  the 
carpet  once  or  twice  with  the  quaint  grace  that  be- 
longed to  her  small  figure,  made  a  dissatisfied  grim- 
ace at  it  in  the  glass,  caught  a  handkerchief  out  of  a 
drawer  and  slid  it  into  her  pocket,  and  then  de- 
scended to  Corey."  Has  this  the  remorseless  in- 
clusion, the  jejune  literalness,  of  a  photograph?  It 
is  faithful  to  fact  in  the  sense  that  it  conveys  Penel- 
ope to  us  by  letting  us  see  her  in  movement,  but  it 

[24] 


is  a  picture  suffused  with  feeling,  feeling  for  her 
charm,  her  characteristic  gesture,  her  humorous  self- 
consciousness,  her  daintiness.  Contrast  this  "real- 
ism "  with  a  conventional  verbal  portrait:  "  So,  in 
the  blinding  glare  of  cloudless  morning,  under  the 
dark,  overarching  orange  trees,  on  a  street,  narrow, 
dirty,  and  anything  but  straight,  they  met.  The 
tall,  well-knit  young  man  in  quiet,  close-fitting  brown, 
was  small-faced,  with  clear,  gray-blue  eyes,  a  hooked 
nose,  and  pink,  boyish  cheeks.  The  man,  rubicund 
all  over  an  ample  countenance,  his  eyes  watery  gray, 
his  surface  suety,  his  outline  pear-shaped,  wore  a 
loose,  flapping  suit  of  soiled,  spotty,  snuff-streaked 
black."  It  is  only  persons  having  no  particular 
feeling  for  literary  art  who  can  go  astray  about  the 
deceptive  simplicity  and  artlessness  of  Mr.  Howells 
—  an  "  artlessness  "  which  this  real  artlessness  re- 
veals. 

And  yet  on  this  very  point  Mr.  Harvey  goes  hope- 
lessly astray.  In  his  chapter  on  the  limitations  of 
Mr.  Howells  he  says, 

His  novels,  his  novelettes,  his  experiments  with  the  short 
story,  his  farces,  his  criticisms  never  take  us  to  the  depths 
of  anything.  There  are,  he  seems  to  say  again  and  again, 
no  depths.  Life  is  a  surface.  .  .  .  He  is  like  those  older 
psychologists  who  kept  us  so  carefully  within  the  limits  of 
consciousness  that  they  never  suspected  the  existence  of  the 
subconscious.  The  matter  might  be  put  in  a  different  fash- 
ion by  noting  that  the  genius  of  Howells  is  objective  and 
not  in  the  least  subjective.  He  can  tell  us  with  subtle 
observation  what  Grace  Green  said  when  she  confessed  her 
love,  how  she  looked,  the  way  she  raised  her  arms  and  what 
she  wore.  He  never  dares  to  say  what  went  on  within  her 

[  25  ] 


soul.  How  could  he  ever  know  the  subconscious?  In 
avoiding  all  that  he  avoids  likewise  the  symptoms  or  the 
depths  of  passion,  its  essence,  as  the  poet  might  say. 

And  again, 

To  tell  the  truth  it  is  impossible  to  read  the  literature  of 
the  psycho-analytic  school  of  Freudian  psychology  without 
marveling  at  the  completeness  with  which  the  whole  fabric 
of  the  Howells  criticism  collapses  and  disintegrates.  It  is 
all  surface  and  no  depth.  .  .  .  These  people  [the  native 
Americans  of  Anglo-Saxon  origin]  have  never  explored  life 
subjectively.  The  American  subconsciousness  is  to  all  in- 
tents and  purposes  a  sealed  book.  .  .  .  Howells  is  a  re- 
porter—  a  reporter  of  genius,  to  repeat,  a  humorist  of  the 
rarest  gifts,  an  artist  with  words,  but  still  a  reporter. 

What  Mr.  Harvey  means  by  "  objective  "  is  not 
clear.  Take  such  a  novel  as  A  Modern  Instance; 
it  is  so  little  confined  to  reporting  that  it  is  actually 
and  almost  specifically  a  morality.  We  witness  the 
steady  deterioration  of  Bartley  Hubbard,  "  the  de- 
cay of  whatever  was  right-principled  in  him."  The 
novelist  is  not  detached.  He  takes  sides  against  his 
villain  and  stigmatizes  his  "  corrupt  nature."  When 
Marcia  has  Bartley  in  her  arms  on  the  eve  of  their 
fated  wedding,  before  the  discrepancy  in  their  de- 
sires is  completely  manifest,  Mr.  Howells  does  not 
aim  for  one  moment  to  remain  a  reporter. 

".  .  .  if  only  you  would  let  me  take  back  — " 
"  Yes,"  he  answered  dreamily.  All  that  wicked  hard- 
ness was  breaking  up  within  him;  he  felt  it  melting  drop 
by  drop  in  his  heart.  This  poor,  love-tossed  soul,  this  fran- 
tic, unguided,  reckless  girl,  was  an  angel  of  mercy  to  him, 
and  in  her  folly  and  error  a  messenger  of  heavenly  peace 
and  hope.  .  .  .  She  took  his  head  between  her  hands  and 

[  26] 


pressed  it  hard  against  her  heart,  and  then  wrapped  her  arms 
tight  about  him,  and  softly  bemoaned  him. 

If  Mr.  Harvey  had  not  himself  derived  a  "  How- 
ells  philosophy  of  women  "  from  the  novels,  it  might 
be  necessary  to  insist  further  that  Mr.  Howells  is 
more  than  a  reporter,  has  indeed  that  "  precious  in- 
sight "  into  the  heart  of  life  that  is  a  synonym  for 
psychology. 

Insofar  as  Mr.  Howells  was  weaned  from  his 
Germanic  strain  and  caught  the  New  England  spiri- 
tual accent,  he  shared,  I  should  imagine,  in  the  voli- 
tional pessimism,  the  voluptuous  sense  of  sin,  of  his 
adopted  community.  '  The  wish  to  be  sincere,  the 
wish  to  be  just,  the  wish  to  be  righteous,"  he  himself 
puts  it,  "  are  before  the  wish  to  be  kind,  merciful, 
humble.  A  people  are  not  a  chosen  people  for  half 
a  dozen  generations  without  acquiring  a  spiritual 
pride  that  remains  with  them  long  after  they  cease 
to  believe  themselves  chosen."  In  his  later  books 
Mr.  Howells  is  so  genial,  so  indulgent,  so  lambent, 
one  cannot  associate  him  with  the  New  England 
righteousness,  but  in  A  Modern  Instance  he  is  a  little 
more  sure  of  Hartley  Hubbard's  baseness  than  he 
has  any  right  to  be.  In  the  father's  jealousy  of  his 
daughter's  husband,  so  faithfully  depicted,  there  is 
an  unsuspected  morbid  element  that  would  have  set 
poor  Mr.  Gaylord  by  the  ears.  And  then  there  is 
that  nasty-nice  self-concerned  righteousness  of  Hal- 
leek.  ("  Don't  you  see  that  his  being  in  love  with 
her  when  she  was  another  man's  wife  is  what  he 
feels  it  to  be  —  an  indelible  stain?  .  .  .  There  was 
a  time  when  he  would  have  been  glad  to  profit  by  a 
divorce."  Atherton  shares  Halleck's  guilty  feeling 

[  27  ] 


about  this  phenomenon  of  love  without  a  marriage 
license.)  More  knowledge  of  the  unconscious 
would  undoubtedly  have  kept  Mr.  Howells  from 
being  quite  so  disedified  by  the  Hartley  Hubbards, 
quite  so  impressed  by  the  Calvinistic  contortionists. 
One  has  only  to  read  that  extraordinary  book, 
A  Boy's  Town,  to  discover  Mr.  Howells's  constitu- 
tional shyness.  He  was  destined  to  be  impressed 
by  New  England,  by  anything  that  presented  itself 
as  having  a  special  worthiness  to  which  he  hardly 
dared  aspire.  It  is  as  if  he  had  always  lived  under 
the  aegis  of  a  frowning  deity,  had  the  heart  to  be 
adventurously  gay,  but  was  too  devout  to  discount 
those  evidences  of  a  reproving  godhead  that  en- 
veloped him.  A  sweet  reasonableness  comes  in  the 
end  to  pervade  his  work,  and  he  is  never  without  a 
continent  humor,  but  there  is  a  deference  in  the  early 
days,  particularly  to  stuffy  Bostonians,  which  makes 
one  ache  for  him.  "  It  is  good  for  the  literary  as- 
pirant," he  says  in  his  pleasant  way,  "  to  realize 
very  early  that  he  is  but  one  of  many,  for  the  vice  of 
our  comparatively  virtuous  craft  is  that  it  tends  to 
make  each  of  us  imagine  himself  central,  if  not  sole. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the  universe  does  not 
revolve  around  any  one  of  us;  we  make  our  circuit 
of  the  sun  along  with  the  other  inhabitants  of  the 
earth,  a  planet  of  inferior  magnitude.  The  thing 
we  strive  for  is  recognition,  but  when  this  comes  it 
is  apt  to  turn  our  heads.  I  should  say,  then,  that 
it  was  better  it  should  not  come  in  a  great  glare  and 
a  loud  shout,  all  at  once,  but  should  steal  slowly 
upon  us,  ray  by  ray,  breath  by  breath."  And  so 
on.  It  is  excellent  counsel  for  most  men,  but  Mr. 
Howells  obeyed  it  too  well  himself.  He  was  al- 

[  28  ] 


ways  ready  to  spoil  others  with  recognition,  "  Mr. 
James  or  Miss  Jewett,  Kielland  or  Bjornson,  Mau- 
passant, Palacio  Valdes,  Giovanni  Verga,  Tourgue- 
nief."  For  himself  he  claimed  nothing.  It  is,  as 
it  now  appears,  lamentable.  Beautiful  as  is  the  con- 
siderateness  that  distinguishes  Mr.  Howells,  deli- 
cate as  is  his  apprehension  of  every  other  person- 
ality, utterly  reliable  as  is  his  democracy,  scrupulous 
as  is  his  virtue,  there  is  a  retardation  of  impulse,  for 
all  his  productiveness,  which  afflicts  one  like  the 
thought  of  living  in  a  land  of  perpetual  cloud.  And 
yet  there  is  never  any  dullness  because  of  his  subor- 
dination of  impulse.  "  After  seeing  Mme.  Bern- 
hardt's  Hamlet  no  one  can  altogether  liberate  him- 
self from  the  fancy  that  the  Prince  of  Denmark  was 
a  girl  of  uncertain  age,  with  crises  of  mannishness 
in  which  she  did  not  seem  quite  a  lady."  Mr. 
Howells  never  loses  his  capacity  for  this  kind  of 
critical  amusement,  whatever  his  American  circum- 
spection. 

Where  Mr.  Howells  is  circumspect  in  a  national 
sense  it  is  rather  with  reference  to  the  human  herd 
than  to  any  social  class  or  any  political  order.  The 
undemocratic  irony  of  poverty  he  never  forgets. 
"  Where,  in  what  business  of  this  hard  world,  is  not 
prosperity  built  upon  the  struggle  of  toiling  men, 
who  still  endeavor  their  poor  best,  and  writhe  and 
writhe  under  the  burden  of  their  brothers  above,  till 
they  lie  under  the  lighter  load  of  their  mother 
earth?  "  Not  on  such  an  issue  as  war  is  he  defer- 
ential. His  disgust  for  war,  "  that  melancholy  and 
humiliating  necessity  of  war,"  its  "  monstrous  in- 
consequence," is  similarly  unsparing  and  candid  and 
free.  The  circumspection  he  shows  is,  as  it  were, 

[  29  ] 


projected  out  of  the  representative  witenagemot  that 
his  conscience  and  his  taste  provide.  So  close  is 
he  to  his  kind,  he  is  humanely  colored  lest  he  upset 
them,  and  however  he  may  disagree  with  them,  even 
passionately,  he  observes  certain  conditions  of 
brotherhood,  or  tribal  gregariousness.  The  sub- 
tleties of  this  national  circumspection  are  too  easily 
ignored  by  Mr.  Harvey.  It  is  certainly  not  the 
finest  moral  contrivance  there  is,  but  it  is  the  most 
significant  contrivance  of  the  age  Mr.  Howells  has 
represented  and  it  calls  for  keen  and  close  and  sym- 
pathetic interpretation. 

The  task  of  interpreting  Mr.  Howells  still  awaits 
American  criticism.  So  faithful  and  disinterested 
an  artist  as  himself  has  stored  up  treasures  of  na- 
tional consciousness  which  will  gain  in  value  as  time 
goes  on.  There  is  nothing  about  him,  not  even  the 
oppressed  patience  which  seems  so  large  a  part  of 
his  goodness,  that  vitiates  his  artistic  being.  He  is 
the  one  American  figure  on  whom  literary  criticism 
has  failed  to  focus  as  it  should,  and  from  whose 
large  intentions  and  richly  freighted  performances 
too  few  national  writers  have  renewed  themselves. 

April  21,  191  j. 


I  30] 


MRS.  WHARTON'S  ART 

MRS.  WHARTON  comes  very  near  giving  com- 
plete gratification  with  this  volume  of  short  stories. 
She  takes  her  subjects  as  only  an  artist  can  take  them, 
for  the  values,  the  resonances,  they  happen  to  have 
for  her;  and  the  fact  that  she  writes  mainly  of  a 
restricted  class  seems  at  the  moment  irrelevant.  It 
would  be  really  irrelevant  if  Mrs.  Wharton  didn't, 
in  a  subtle  enough  way,  become  condescending  to 
persons  who  live  on,  and  off,  the  fringe.  Sometimes 
as  between  a  perfectly  initiated  pet  and  a  bounding 
newcomer  one  gets  a  whiff  of  sublimated  sensibili- 
ties. Of  such  assaulted  class  consciousness  as  this 
sort  of  thing  implies,  Mrs.  Wharton  occasionally 
gives  signs.  Among  the  petty  bourgeoisie  she 
moves  with  comparative  sympathy.  Among  more 
formidable  representatives  of  the  same  ilk  she  moves 
with  something  not  unlike  a  sniff.  She  is  difficult  to 
please,  but  the  difficulty  is  not  always  due  to  in- 
trinsic considerations.  For  a  person  of  such  lancing 
intelligence  she  is  strangely  deficient  in  comedy.  It 
is  not  that  one  wants  her  to  have  a  richer  palette  or 
a  more  dashing  line.  It  is  not  that  one  wishes  her 
to  burst  on  the  world  exuberantly,  with  a  yawp. 
It  is  merely  that  with  a  higher  sense  of  comedy  other 
realities  would  emerge  in  her  landscape  which,  un- 

Xingu,   and   other   stories,   by  Edith  Wharton.     Scribners,  New 
York. 

[31   ] 


der  the  light  that  is  habitual  with  her,  is  somewhat 
acid,  cold  and  bleak. 

But  astringent  as  one  may  deem  Mrs.  Wharton's 
mood,  it  would  be  absurd  to  miss  her  deep  excel- 
lences on  that  account.  There  are  many  manifesta- 
tions of  America  for  which  she  has  not  the  faculty, 
but  those  that  peculiarly  arrest  her,  those  that  de- 
pend on  being  of  the  feminine  gender  among  well- 
off  people  in  a  given  time  and  sphere  extract  from 
her  the  sort  of  appreciation  that  amounts  to  genius. 
The  fate  that  she  has  most  absorbingly  contemplated 
and  most  handsomely  represented  is  perhaps  that  of 
persons  whose  lot  is  enhanced  by  money  or  family 
or  taste,  and  whose  impulses  pay  reluctant  toll  to 
an  order  in  whose  establishment  their  happiness  and 
their  honor  are  involved.  It  is,  if  you  like,  worldly 
wisdom  that  here  occupies  Mrs.  Wharton;  it  hap- 
pens however,  to  be  wisdom.  Congruous  as  she  is 
with  Scribner's  Magazine,  incongruous  with  the 
Walt  Whitmans,  she  is  still  the  intent  observer  of 
nature  adaptive  and  assertive,  of  pliancies  and  sub- 
jections, desertions  and  rebellions.  In  some  re- 
spects she  is  a  pharmacist  in  her  handling  of  vital 
forces.  She  deals  in  essences  and  double  distilla- 
tions. She  uses  a  delicate  measure  to  weigh  out 
what  is  precious  or  deadly.  She  dispenses  little 
that  she  regards  as  lethal  or  valuable  outside  of  what 
would  fit  in  an  apothecary  scales.  She  is  grave, 
minute,  scrupulous,  analytic.  She  is  dramatic  hypo- 
dermically.  But  to  such  fine  uses  does  she  put  the 
sympathies  and  perceptions  with  which  she  is  en- 
dowed, that  a  reader  would  be  strangely  callous  who 
was  not  lost  in  admiration  among  the  merits  of  her 
art. 

[32] 


Take  as  perhaps  the  best  example  in  this  volume 
the  tale  called  The  Long  Run.     It  is  a   favorite 
theme  of  Mrs.  Wharton's,  the  drama  of  a  love  that 
is  not  coincident  with  marriage.     In  this  case,  as 
indeed  in  most  of  the  stories  in  Xingu,  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton  is  seeing  these  things  in  retrospect,  not  as  mat- 
ters of  palpitation  so  much  as  matters  of  eventual 
chemistry.     The  man  in  this  instance  harks  back  to 
his  hour  of  decision,  the  hour  when  everything  de- 
pended on  the  driving  force  of  his  impulse  as  against 
her  husband's  preemption.     She  is  willing  to  go  out 
with  her  lover,  she  has  no  sense  of  having  been  pre- 
empted.    She  knows  that  to   her   husband  she   is 
furniture,    that    there    are    no    "  reasons  —  honest 
reasons  —  for  staying  there."     This  woman  at  the 
lift  of  the  flashing  sunny  wave  can  invite  her  lover 
to  it.     "  The  first  great  anatomist  was  the  man  who 
stuck  his  knife  in  a  heart  that  was  beating;   and 
the  only  way  to  find  out  what  doing  a  thing  will  be 
like  is  to  do  it!  "     The  male  in  the  man,  orthodox 
in   possessiveness,    refuses.     She    cannot   swim,   he 
sees  it,  except  in  the  lifebelt  of  matrimony.     And 
what  that  decision  came  to,  in  the  perspective  of  his 
own  resignation  and  her  later  re-marriage,  is  the 
story  Mrs.  Wharton  beautifully  and  sympathetically 
contrives.     They  are  not  people  seen  in  the  various 
successive  attitudes  of  a  morality,  registering  this 
and  that.     They  are  people  whose  morality  is  in 
solution,  never  labeled  for  that  particular  brand  of 
interest  by  Mrs.  Wharton  herself.     She  has  no  in- 
tention for  them  save  to  reveal  them,  to  give  them 
in  their  own  "  flood  of  joy  that  comes  of  heightened 
emotion,"  their  own  persuasions  as  to  life,  and  the 
price  it  cost  them  to  have  had  him  incapable  of  cross- 

C  33  ] 


ing  a  stream  that  had  no  bridge.     A  story  like  this  is 
the  flower  of  a  career. 

Permeated  with  equal  sympathy,  rather  a  dejected 
and  vengeful  sympathy,  is  Bunner  Sisters,  a  fasci- 
nating novelette  of  two  middle-aged  tradeswomen 
in  old  New  York.  The  odor  of  condescension  does 
not,  for  me,  cling  to  this  example  of  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton's  studies  in  a  sphere  not  excitingly  fashionable. 
There  are  inflections  she  catches  with  sharp  exact- 
ness. There  is  no  attempt  to  make  Ann  Eliza  and 
Evelina  seem  less  like  morons  than  they  really  were. 
But  the  story  has  an  almost  affectionate  complete- 
ness of  detail  and  a  totally  affectionate  occupation 
with  both  Ann  Eliza  and  Evelina  in  the  bitter-sweet 
of  their  intimacy  with  the  fated  Mr.  Ramy.  The 
Bunners  do  not  come  off  very  well,  defenseless  in  a 
fight  so  manifold  and  so  complicated  as  life;  but 
they  are  not  exceptional.  In  not  one  of  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton's  eight  stories  does  any  one  come  off  particu- 
larly well,  except  of  course  the  potential  murderer  in 
Triumph  of  Night  and  the  brute-husband  in  The 
Choice. 

Xingu  is  perhaps  the  cleverest  of  these  stories. 
It  is  also  the  least  valuably  perceptive.  A  satire  on 
the  excessive  seriousness,  the  pretentiousness,  the 
false  zealotry  of  a  small  American  "  culture  "  club, 
it  goes  rather  too  far  in  an  acrimonious  caricature  of 
the  women  as  human  beings.  Mrs.  Wharton's  acid 
bites  fairly  into  their  idiocy  as  the  pursuers  of  cul- 
ture, it  scarifies  them  too  deeply  in  their  social 
character.  The  Laura  Clyde  and  Mrs.  Plinth  and 
Mrs.  Leveret  of  real  life  would  be  equally  insuf- 
ferable about  books,  but  Mrs.  Wharton's  cold  dis- 
like for  their  nature  is  quite  unjustified.  It  is  in 

[34J 


dealing  with  such  women  as  these,  women  who  if 
anything  would  err  on  the  side  of  amiability  and 
whose  main  mistake  is  to  take  too  seriously  the  obli- 
gations imposed  on  them  by  a  culture  not  native,  that 
Mrs.  Wharton  becomes  frigidly  conventional.  Her 
Mrs.  Plinths  and  Mrs.  Leverets  are  misjudged  from 
the  vantage  point  of  Lenox  or  Tuxedo,  or  wherever 
it  is  that  women  do  not  allow  even  their  illiteracy  to 
detract  from  their  self-confidence. 

Despite  Bunner  Sisters,  it  would  be  egregious 
loyalty  to  Mrs.  Wharton  as  an  artist  not  to  admit 
that  she  is  primarily  a  person  interested  in  a  re- 
stricted world.  She  has  an  ear  for  the  clash  and 
chime  of  life  outside  Lenox  and  those  other  places 
where  ministers  of  grace  draw  your  bath  and  steal 
about,  exaggerating  your  wardrobe,  while  you  pre- 
tend to  be  asleep.  Her  story  of  wartime  in  the 
Vosges  and  the  German  intrusion  on  a  chateau  there 
indicates  that.  But  it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  she 
tends  to  start  with  men  of  means  and  women  who 
use  their  means  to  their  ends.  One  has  only  to 
glance  at  her  personae  —  Horace  Pursh,  Halston 
Merrick,  Susy  Suffern,  Harriet  Fresbie,  Wilbour 
Barkley,  Austin  Wrayford,  Cobham  Stilling,  Philip 
Trant,  Mrs.  Lidcote,  Mrs.  Lorin  Boulger,  H.  Macy 
Greer,  Franklin  Ide,  Jim  Cumnor.  These  are  not 
the  kind  of  people  with  whom  you  share  cracker- 
jack  in  a  day-coach.  These  are  not  the  lads  and 
lassies  who  put  skids  under  William  H.  Taft  in 
1912,  abandoned  themselves  to  Onward  Christian 
Soldiers,  at  Chicago,  and  helped  Mr.  Roosevelt  to 
be  a  traitor  to  his  class.  Rather  the  contrary.  But 
on  the  Atlantic  sea-board,  using  the  Alleghenies  as 
a  sort  of  privet  hedge,  Mrs.  Wharton  holds  these 

[  35  ] 


persons  in  preference  —  out  of  proportion  to  their 
constituency  in  society  as  a  whole  though  not  by  any 
means  out  of  proportion  to  their  interest.  For  their 
interest,  as  Mrs.  Wharton  considers  them,  is  not  a 
fatuous  fashionableness.  It  is  the  chance  they  offer 
for  intensive  human  relations,  those  relations  that  in- 
clude love,  but  also  so  often  preclude  it,  and  always 
pivoting  on  marriage.  Marriage  and  love  are  the 
great  factors  in  the  drama  Mrs.  Wharton  concen- 
trates upon.  Of  these  the  greater,  in  the  frankly 
middle-aged  stories  in  Xingu,  is  neither  one  nor  the 
other  automatically;  she  is  cool  enough  to  say  that 
the  cost  of  love  may  be  too  heavy,  and  warm  enough 
to  have  its  balance  sheet  her  main  preoccupation. 
It  is  this  absorption  in  the  delicate  processes,  the 
feminized  processes,  which  decide  where  the  be- 
medaled  warriors  shall  dine,  and  whom  sit  next  to, 
and  whom  take  to  wife  and  whom  to  bed,  that  has 
kept  her  up-town  and  socially  excited.  The  quality 
of  that  excitement  is  the  principal  charm  of  Xingu, 
an  achievement  that  no  other  American  is  emulat- 
ing. 

February  10,  1917. 


[  36] 


MRS.  WHARTON'S  LIMITATIONS 

novelist  so  accomplished  as  Mrs.  Wharton 
could  fail  to  write  a  personable  story,  but  there  is 
air  of  falsity  about  this  new  invention  of  hers  that 
arouses  a  good  deal  of  interest.  The  idiom,  so  far 
as  an  outsider  may  guess,  is  quite  true  to  New  Eng- 
land. At  the  proper  moment  the  girl,  Charity  says, 
"  I  want  you  should  leave  me,"  and  one  hears  a 
human  voice.  The  background  is  intimately  ob- 
served, so  that  one  sees  the  clean  structure  of  New 
England  houses  of  many  types,  and  is  constantly 
aware  of  the  dominant  Mountain  from  whose  law- 
lessness Charity  was  redeemed  into  North  Dormer, 
to  look  forward  to  that  sexual  limbo  which  rewards 
New  England  virtue.  The  sweet  airs  of  New  Eng- 
land summer  fields  and  woods  give  a  crispness  and 
charm  to  those  pages  over  which  Mrs.  Wharton 
lingers  most  affectionately,  and  the  contrast  of  a  hot 
holiday  throng  in  a  fair-sized  neighboring  town  is 
prosecuted  with  all  of  her  lynx-like  sharpness.  It 
is  certainly  not  in  these  respects  that  the  story  can 
be  said  to  be  false. 

The  theme  to  which  Mrs.  Wharton  gives  such 
circumstantialities  is  no  more  alien  to  her,  so  far  as 
intelligent  comprehension  goes,  than  the  idiom  and 
the  background  themselves.  It  is  one  of  those 
stories  of  the  inexorable  that  seem  perfectly  to  lend 
themselves  to  Mrs.  Wharton's  icy  restraint.  If  you 

Summer,  by  Edith  Wharton.    Scribners,  New  York. 
[37] 


want  to  get  a  region  in  which  inexorability  of  the 
moral  order  has  a  whacking  good  time,  you  do  not 
have  to  go  to  New  England.  George  Eliot,  as  I 
seem  to  remember  from  terrified  perusal  at  the  age 
of  fourteen,  made  the  mills  of  the  gods  grind  with 
the  usual  insufficiency  of  car-grease  in  the  Italy  of 
Romola  and  Tito.  When  it  came  to  the  inexorable 
in  the  classics,  Greece  was  its  favorite  locale.  Be- 
fore that  time  the  land  of  Job  was  its  eminent  home 
—  and,  if  one  is  going  to  be  open-handed  in  this  re- 
spect, what's  the  matter  with  Wessex  as  the  scene  of 
cursed  spite?  But  while  New  England  has  no  ex- 
clusive proprietorship  in  the  grim-inexorable,  there 
is  no  doubt  that  the  specific  gravity  of  human  con- 
duct is  deemed  higher  in  that  estimable  region  than 
in  any  other  region  habitable  by  the  serious  story- 
teller. Mrs.  Katherine  Fullerton  Gerould  goes  one 
better  than  Mrs.  Wharton  when  she  wants  inexora- 
bility. She  also  resorts  to  New  Englanders  but  she 
transplants  them  to  Mocha  or  Java  or  Guatemala 
and  serves  them  up  with  a  little  Golden  Bough-wow. 
This  mixture  of  strange  and  familiar  gods  jags  one's 
nerves  in  a  delightful  manner,  but  there  is  a  certain 
incontrovertible  safety  and  sanity  about  harsh  moral 
laws  as  they  operate  in  New  England,  and  Mrs. 
Wharton's  instinct  is  perfectly  sound  when  she  pro- 
ceeds to  exhibit  the  inexorable  doing  business  at  the 
same  old  stand. 

The  trouble  with  Summer,  however,  is  that  Mrs. 
Wharton  rather  forces  her  note.  It  is  not  that  se- 
duction as  a  scheme  for  literary  bouleversement  is 
a  little  out  of  date.  There  is  no  such  thing  as  a 
catastrophe  too  trite  to  be  worth  reciting.  It  is  only 
that  Mrs.  Wharton,  always  inclined  to  be  sub-hu- 

[  38] 


man,  is  much  too  callous  in  the  uses  to  which  she 
has  put  this  seduction.  She  has  seen  with  that 
frigid  eye  of  hers  what  an  excellent  chance  there 
would  be,  against  the  background  of  an  outlaw 
Mountain,  to  show  a  child  adopted  into  the  prim 
village  violating  the  code  of  the  village,  being  ut- 
terly incapable  of  enduring  the  squalor  of  the  out- 
lawry from  which  she  sprang,  and  being  ruthlessly 
mangled  between  the  stark  cliff  that  rejects  her  and 
the  waves  that  fling  her  blindly  against  it.  This 
scene  of  the  pitiless,  the  inevitable,  the  inexorable, 
has  special  attractions  for  Mrs.  Wharton's  peculiar 
temperament.  It  is  not  that  she  is  so  full  of  pity, 
like  Thomas  Hardy,  that  she  cannot  remove  her  eyes 
from  the  spectacle  of  hapless  shipwreck.  It  is  not 
that  she  is  so  full  of  lifebuoy  morality,  like  George 
Eliot,  that  she  cannot  help  taking  a  coastguard  in- 
terest in  these  perilous  situations.  It  is  more  that 
she  cannot  help  realizing  the  grisly  effectiveness  of 
seeing  a  fair  skiff  riding  in  on  the  waves  of  those 
forces  that  dominate  life,  and  wrecked  for  one's  fas- 
cinated eyes.  The  wreck  may  be  merely  to  a  dream, 
the  insubstantial  fabric  of  a  vision,  but  the  authen- 
ticity of  that  wreck,  the  bedevilment  of  the  vision, 
give  a  glow  to  the  specialist  in  frustration  that  occu- 
pies a  part  of  Mrs.  Wharton's  soul. 

A  good  shipwreck,  moral  or  physical,  is  by  no 
means  the  least  satisfactory  of  fictional  themes,  but 
no  author  has  a  right  to  run  up  and  down  the  shore 
line  waving  a  harmless  heroine  to  destruction. 
What  one  dislikes  in  Summer  is  the  undoubted  pur- 
pose of  the  author  to  dish  the  heroine  for  the  sake 
of  the  sensation  of  dishing  her.  One  really  suffers 
on  account  of  the  pace  at  which  Mrs.  Wharton  hur- 

[39  ] 


ries  over  the  poignancy  of  a  human  record  to  arrive 
at  a  cruel  predicament.  The  feeling  is  certainly  es- 
tablished before  the  end  that  as  a  human  being  Char- 
ity Royall  is  nothing  to  her  author,  is  merely  a  crea- 
ture to  be  substantiated  in  detail  in  order  that  a  dra- 
matic sensation  can  be  properly  pulled  off,  and  the 
curtain  rung  down  before  a  breathless  audience. 
The  scene  itself  is  not  just  an  ingredient  in  Mrs. 
Wharton's  contrivance,  and  the  youth,  Lucius  Har- 
ney,  is  not  dislocated  for  the  purposes  of  the  story. 
But  the  primitive  mountaineers,  Charity's  guardian 
lawyer,  Royall,  who  wants  to  marry  her,  the  fierce 
pride  of  Charity,  the  vague  "  other  girl "  in  the 
offing  to  whom  the  seducer  is  engaged,  are  all  factors 
in  an  arrangement,  a  scheme,  which  has  none  of  that 
generous  human  preoccupation  about  it  which  is 
needed  to  win  the  credence  of  the  reader.  Mrs. 
Wharton  wants  the  credence  of  the  reader,  but  she 
proposes  to  earn  it  by  authoritative  manner,  not  by 
any  simple  method  of  humane  contagion.  The  re- 
sult is  a  falsity  that  is  scarcely  accountable  in  an 
artisf  so  acute. 

Where  this  is  most  evident  is  in  the  perfunctory 
treatment  of  those  situations  in  the  life  of  Charity 
Royall  that  most  ask  one  to  put  oneself  in  her  place. 
There  is,  for  example,  the  occasion  on  which  this 
girl,  in  love  with  the  young  architect  who  has  come 
for  the  summer  to  North  Dormer,  overhears  her 
guardian  disclose  to  him  the  secret  she  has  never 
gassed  of  her  disgraceful  parentage. 

"  My  God,  how  ghastly,"  Harney  murmured ;  and  Char- 
'"y,  choking  with  humiliation,  sprang  to  her  feet  and  ran 
•pstairs.  She  knew  at  last:  knew  that  she  was  the  child  of 

[40] 


a  drunken  convict  and  of  a  woman  who  wasn't  "  half- 
human,"  and  was  glad  to  have  her  go;  and  she  had  heard 
this  history  of  her  origin  related  to  the  one  being  in  whose 
eyes  she  longed  to  appear  superior  to  the  people  about 
her!  ...  It  was  too  bitter  to  picture  him  as  the  detached 
impartial  listener  to  such  a  story.  "  I  wish  he'd  go  away : 
I  wish  he'd  go  to-morrow,  and  never  come  back ! "  she 
moaned  to  her  pillow;  and  far  into  the  night  she  lay  there, 
in  the  disordered  dress  she  had  forgotten  to  take  off,  her 
whole  soul  a  tossing  misery  on  which  her  hopes  and  dreams 
spun  about  like  drowning  straws. 

This  is  a  curiously  superficial  and  mechanical  ac- 
count of  a  heroine's  crisis.  Girls  do  moan  to  their 
pillows,  of  course,  and  lie  disordered  far  into  the 
night.  But  assassination  of  a  hope  would  create  a 
more  bitter  fever  than  this.  Imagine  Mr.  Howells, 
restrained  as  he  really  is,  offering  these  few  hack- 
neyed and  jejune  phrases  as  part  of  a  spiritual  his- 
tory. The  fact  is,  Mrs.  Wharton  needed  Chanty 
Royal's  unfortunate  ancestry  in  her  business  as  a 
story-teller,  but  the  effect  of  disclosing  what  in  real- 
ity was  nothing  more  than  a  literary  convenance,  she 
could  not  take  too  seriously. 

Because  of  this  and  other  failures  in  sympathy  and 
plausibility,  Summer  cannot  be  set  to  the  right  side 
of  Mrs.  Wharton's  account.  The  predicament  of 
the  girl  who  loves  more  than  she  is  loved  is  intensely 
valid,  the  social  situation  of  a  girl  whose  child  is  to 
be  born  out  of  marriage  is  the  most  crucial  and  diffi- 
cult in  the  world.  But  Mrs.  Wharton  has  arranged 
for  Charity's  misfortune  too  deliberately,  deprived 
her  of  aid  too  sweepingly,  afforded  her  marriage  with 
her  guardian  too  simply,  to  be  known  as  an  artist 
in  handling  this  great  theme.  It  is  true  that  Mrs. 


Wharton  has  made  the  shadows  of  the  Mountain 
funeral  quite  terrible,  and  has  brought  lawyer  Royall 
to  the  fore  as  a  welcome  relief  to  an  unremitting 
strain.  This  kind  of  skill,  however,  is  the  only  real 
gift  that  Summer  illustrates.  It  is  not  a  repellent 
story,  but  is  essentially  an  empty  one,  and  suggests 
too  often  the  failings  of  a  person  who  is  capable  of 
going  slumming  among  souls. 
July  14,  1917. 


[4*] 


THE  GENTEEL  TRADITION 

r  EW  things  in  America  are  so  disreputable  as  the 
I.  W.  W.  To  have  Mr.  Churchill,  the  most  repu- 
table of  national  novelists,  plunge  into  the  thick  of 
their  polluted  stream  amounts  to  an  intellectual  chal- 
lenge. Has  it  been  unfair  to  consider  Mr.  Churchill 
definitely  fixable  by  the  aid  of  that  brilliant  diagnosis 
of  Mr.  George  Santayana,  The  Genteel  Tradition  in 
American  Philosophy?  Or  has  it  been  unfair  to 
regard  the  I.  W.  W.  as  lacking  in  claims  on  gentility? 
On  the  surface,  the  collocation  of  Winston  Churchill 
and  the  I.  W.  W.  upsets  one's  previous  notion  of 
both  institutions.  It  demands  investigation,  asking 
either  for  a  new  understanding  of  the  labor  radicals 
or  a  closer  definition  of  the  novelist's  possibilities. 

Grim  industrialism  in  the  throes  of  an  I.  W.  W. 
strike  is  surely  a  theme  uncongenial  to  Mr.  Churchill, 
and,  if  the  supercilious  view  of  him  were  correct,  he 
would  no  more  attempt  to  tackle  such  a  subject  than 
Mr.  Theodore  Dreiser  would  write  a  Methodist 
novel.  But  where  the  supercilious  fail  in  their  esti- 
mate of  Mr.  Churchill  is  in  supposing  that  he  repre- 
sents a  dead  tradition.  He  is  not,  it  is  true,  Di- 
onysiac.  His  is  the  cautious  progressivism  of  a 
public  trustee.  But  the  singular  fact  about  him,  the 
main  element  in  his  success,  is  the  tenacity  of  his 
Americanistic  vitality.  Traditions  are  viscous  and 

The  Dwelling-Place  of  Light,  by  Winston   Churchill.    Macrail- 
lan,  New  York. 

[43   ] 


their  flexibility  is  hard  to  credit,  but  every  novel  that 
Mr.  Churchill  writes  shows  his  skill  at  adaptation, 
his  power  of  accommodating  himself  and  his  tra- 
dition to  new  and  awkward  facts.  And  it  is  not 
merely  that  he  accommodates  himself.  By  virtue  of 
his  conscientious  nature,  he  chews  hard,  he  swallows, 
he  assimilates.  It  is  not  that  his  temperament 
prompts  him  to  seek  novelty.  He  is  not  adventur- 
ous. It  is  simply  that  he  heroically  accepts  the  fare 
set  before  his  country  and  his  tradition  and  invariably 
manages  to  survive. 

The  fare,  in  this  instance,  is  the  Lawrence  strike. 
How  can  fiction  assimilate  this  strike  so  that  it  can 
give  an  understandable  story  to  the  children  of  the 
genteel  tradition?  There  is  something  big  and  gen- 
erous about  Mr.  Churchill's  undertaking  such  a  task. 
His  absence  of  humor  is,  of  course,  a  sure  sign  of  his 
fixity  in  the  tradition  out  of  which,  and  for  which,  he 
is  interpreting  the  new  America,  but  even  though  he 
is  solemn  and  responsible  in  regard  to  his  audience 
he  does  not  flinch  under  the  stiff  requirements  of  his 
theme.  He  starts,  quite  naturally,  with  an  Ameri- 
can rather  than  an  immigrant  family,  but  it  is  a 
family  that  in  spite  of  branching  New  England  an- 
cestry has  sunk  to  ignoble  immigrant  level  and  is 
barely  able  to  keep  its  chin  above  water.  The  head 
of  the  house  is  an  amiable  incompetent  man  of  fifty- 
five,  Edward  Bumpus,  who  is  gate-keeper  of  the 
huge  Chippering  Mill.  Finding  refuge  from  reality 
in  genealogical  retrospections  of  the  Bumpus  family, 
he  does  nothing  to  ameliorate  the  lives  of  his  driven 
wife  and  his  two  wage-earning  daughters.  One  of 
these,  Lise,  is  dedicated  by  Mr.  Churchill  to  the 
Juggernaut  of  the  imprudent.  She  is  pleasure-lov- 

[44] 


ing  and  vulgar  and  slangy  and  cheap.  She  wants  a 
"  good  time  "  and  takes  it,  and  is  seduced  and  be- 
comes a  prostitute.  Mr.  Churchill  is  sorry  for  her 
but  the  symmetry  of  his  novel  demands  a  weak  sister. 
It  is  the  other  girl,  Janet  Bumpus,  whose  personality 
is  his  real  concern  and  whose  fate  is  the  gist  of  his 
story.  It  is  through  her,  recognizably  a  high-spir- 
ited and  well  bred  American  girl  whose  lot  is  cast 
with  the  proletaire,  that  Mr.  Churchill  strives  to 
realize  a  condition  which  is  still  rather  ungrateful  to 
good  Americans. 

"  Where  is  the  way  to  the  dwelling-place  of 
light?  "  That  is  the  question  asked  by  Janet's  very 
nature.  The  great  mill  town  gives  her  no  answer. 
Its  voice  is  the  sharp  siren  in  the  gray  morning,  whip- 
ping the  sleeper  with  scorpions.  Out  of  the  crowded 
streets,  the  miserable  tenements,  the  myriad  polyglot 
operatives,  Janet  gets  no  response  to  her  own  sub- 
merged desires.  She  is  not  aware  of  a  class  strug- 
gle. She  has  no  social  consciousness.  She  is  just  a 
valuable  human  being,  according  to  any  conventional 
reckoning  of  value,  who  is  compelled  to  fight  for  her- 
self in  a  hideous  industrial  milieu.  What  chance  is 
there,  provided  she  is  incapable  of  baseness,  of  hard- 
ness, of  acquiescence?  Where,  for  a  fine  American 
girl  working  as  stenographer  on  low  wages  in  a  mill 
town,  "  where  is  the  way  to  the  dwelling-place  of 
light?" 

The  agent  of  the  great  mill  in  which  Janet  works 
is  a  red-blood  New  England  business  man  named 
Claude  Ditmar. 

At  five  and  forty  he  was  a  vital,  dominating,  dust-colored 
man,  six  feet  and  half  an  inch  in  height,  weighing  a  hun- 

[45  ] 


dred  and  ninety  pounds,  and  thus  a  trifle  fleshy.  When 
relaxed,  and  in  congenial  company,  he  looked  rather  boyish, 
an  aspect  characteristic  of  many  American  business  men  of 
to-day. 

In  this  man's  office  Janet  Bumpus  (a  dreadful 
name)  goes  to  work.  Something  about  her  attracts 
him.  Intent  and  preoccupied  as  he  is,  one  brief  en- 
counter outside  the  office  decides  his  interest.  She 
is  made  his  private  stenographer;  and  then,  as  Mr. 
Churchill  observes, 

Our  stage  is  set.  A  young  woman,  conscious  of  ability, 
owes  her  promotion  primarily  to  certain  dynamic  feminine 
qualities  with  which  she  is  endowed.  And  though  she  may 
make  an  elaborate  pretense  of  ignoring  the  fact,  in  her  heart 
she  knows  and  resents  it,  while  at  the  same  time,  paradoxi- 
cally, she  gets  a  thrill  from  it  —  a  sustaining  and  inspiring 
thrill  of  power!  On  its  face  it  is  a  business  arrangement; 
secretly  —  attempt  to  repudiate  this  as  one  may  —  it  is 
tinged  with  the  colors  of  high  adventure. 

The  possessive  Mr.  Ditmar  finds  Janet  inflexibly 
independent.  The  business  of  the  mill  begins  to 
fascinate  her,  and  his  power  to  impress  her,  but  his 
unimaginative  greed  for  her  makes  surrender  impos- 
sible. Her  spirited  denial  of  him  has,  however,  the 
effect  of  completing  his  love  for  her.  She  wishes  to 
withstand  this  love,  but  before  she  completely  com- 
prehends her  own  motives  she  yields  to  him,  only  to 
become  convinced  immediately  after,  by  the  simul- 
taneous "  ruin  "  of  her  sister  and  outbreak  of  the 
strike,  that  she  has  been  sacrificed  to  a  capitalist- 
exploiter's  greed.  The  violence  of  her  rebound, 
under  the  circumstances,  lands  her  into  the  ranks  of 
the  I.  W.  W. ;  stenographer  to  a  red-lipped  agitator 

[  46  ] 


who  proves  quite  as  possessive  as  the  man  against 
whom  she  takes  up  arms. 

Considering  the  route  by  which  Mr.  Churchill 
arrives  at  the  I.  W.  W.,  a  certain  frightened  gen- 
tility might  reasonably  be  looked  for.  The  one 
character  he  sees  interiorly,  Janet,  comes  to  the 
I.  W.  W.  on  the  basis  of  a  private  grievance,  with- 
out any  pronounced  conviction  beforehand  as  to  the 
wrongness  of  the  employers'  attitude  and  without  any 
convincing  proof  when  she  gives  up  Ditmar  that  her 
own  plight  is  the  same  as  her  sister's.  Though  he 
insists  that  he  wants  to  marry  her,  she  regards  her- 
self as  outraged.  Her  pregnancy  drives  her  mad. 
She  even  wants  to  kill  him.  And  the  chaos  of  her 
feelings  is  telescoped  with  her  radicalism,  mere  re- 
action as  it  is.  But  the  I.  W.  W.  leaders  with  whom 
she  associates  are  seriously  reported.  Mr.  Churchill 
copes  with  them  in  the  sense  that  he  models  them 
on  actual  leaders,  and  represents  their  movement  as 
comprehensible  and  definable  — "  a  decrepit  social 
system  in  a  moment  of  lowered  vitality  becomes  an 
easy  prey  to  certain  diseases  which  respectable  com- 
munities are  not  supposed  to  have."  "  Loose  morals 
and  loose  ties!  " —  Mr.  Churchill  is  not  intimidated 
by  these  symbols  of  syndicalism.  Even  the  prattle 
of  his  red-lipped  agitator  is  not  a  perversion.  The 
fundamental  limitation  is  the  focussing  of  the  crisis 
through  Janet,  an  unconvinced  American  who  is 
I.  W.  W.  by  misfortune,  not  by  "  fault." 

The  end  of  the  book  sends  one  back  to  Mr. 
Santayana's  diagnosis. 

America  [he  said]  is  not  simply  a  young  country  with  an 
old  mentality:  it  is  a  country  with  two  mentalities,  one  a 
survival  of  the  beliefs  and  standards  of  the  fathers,  the  other 

[  47  ] 


an  expression  of  the  instincts,  practice,  and  discoveries  of 
the  younger  generations.  In  all  the  higher  things  of  the 
mind  —  in  religion,  in  literature,  in  the  moral  emotions  — 
it  is  the  hereditary  spirit  that  still  prevails,  so  much  so  that 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  finds  that  America  is  a  hundred  years 
behind  the  times.  The  truth  is  that  one-half  of  the  Ameri- 
can mind,  that  not  occupied  intensely  in  practical  affairs, 
has  remained,  I  will  not  say  high-and-dry,  but  slightly  be- 
calmed ;  it  has  floated  gently  in  the  back  water,  while,  along- 
side, in  invention  and  industry  and  social  organization,  the 
other  half  of  the  mind  was  leaping  down  a  sort  of  Niagara 
Rapids.  This  division  may  be  found  symbolized  in  Ameri- 
can architecture:  a  neat  reproduction  of  the  colonial  man- 
sion—  with  some  modern  comforts  introduced  surrep- 
titiously—  stands  beside  the  sky-scraper.  The  American 
Will  inhabits  the  sky-scraper;  the  American  Intellect  in- 
herits the  colonial  mansion.  The  one  is  the  sphere  of  the 
American  man;  the  other,  at  least  predominantly,  of  the 
American  woman.  The  one  is  all  aggressive  enterprise ;  the 
other  is  all  genteel  tradition. 

It  is  to  the  genteel  tradition,  at  any  rate,  that 
Janet  escapes.  Mr.  Churchill  intimates  that  she  is 
broken  by  her  tragic  experiences,  and  out  of  his 
goodwill  he  commiserates  those  experiences.  But  it 
is  to  the  genteel  tradition  that  she  flies.  In  it  she 
finds  herself  and  is  at  home. 

If  The  Dwelling-Place  of  Light  were  insincere, 
this  adherence  to  tradition  would  destroy  its  sub- 
stantiality. As  it  is,  faithful  though  it  is  to  the 
antiquated,  the  largeness  of  the  considerations  that 
it  attempts  to  master  gives  it  an  eminence  of  its  own. 
At  times  unspeakably  clumsy,  seldom  or  never 
comedic,  it  has  the  strength  that  always  goes  with 
straightforwardness,  and  it  is  too  often  mellow  and 
tender  in  spirit  not  to  be  deemed  fine  as  well  as  large. 

[48] 


Mr.  Churchill  will  never  escape  from  gentility.  He 
has  achieved  his  position  as  its  favorite  interpreter. 
But  the  vitality  shown  in  The  Dwelling-Place  of 
Light  proves  how  persistent  is  his  faith  in  its  tenets. 
He  can  make  a  place  for  the  I.  W.  W.  in  his  tradi- 
tion rather  than  give  up  an  American  mill  or  an 
American  girl. 

October  13,  1917. 


[49] 


A  NEW  NOVELIST 

WINDY  MCPHERSON  has  a  Scottish  sound. 

It  suggests  a  revival  of  those  quaint  Hoot  Man 
novels  that  once  enabled  Ian  MacLaren  and  J.  M. 
Barrie  and  the  author  of  The  Lilac  Sunbonnet  to 
make  hay.  To  pump  up  enthusiasm  for  such  a 
novel  at  this  date  would  be  perverse  rather  than 
heroic,  and  the  honest  reader  might  well  shrink  from 
being  asked  to  admire  another  variation  in  plaid 
styles.  But  there  is  no  need  for  aversion  in  this  in- 
stance. It  is  only  Mr.  Sherwood  Anderson's  title 
that  implies  gnarled  dialect  and  thorn-tree  humor. 
Windy  McPherson's  Son  has  nothing  whatever  to 
do  with  the  bonnie  blue  bell  or  the  bonnie  brier  bush, 
it  was  not  written  out  of  love  for  the  bonnie  bonnie 
banks  of  Loch  Lomond,  or  the  still  more  bonnie 
bonnie  Bank  of  Scotland. 

A  Chicago  man  born  in  a  small  middle-western 
town,  Mr.  Anderson  has  written  a  novel  of  the  life 
he  himself  knows.  He  begins  with  Caxton,  Iowa. 
Sam  McPherson,  the  son  of  that  "  Windy  "  who 
indulged  in  G.  A.  R.  bally-hoo,  is  the  newsboy  of  his 
little  town  on  the  railway  line  between  Omaha  and 
Chicago.  Sam  is  reticent  and  keen  and  efficient  in 
inverse  ratio  to  the  drunkenness  and  wind  and  waste 
of  his  father.  After  his  mother's  death  the  boy 
makes  Chicago.  In  the  commission  business  on 
South  Water  Street  he  founds  his  fortune.  He  steps 

Windy  McPherson's  Son,  by  Sherwood   Anderson.    John  Lane, 
tf  ew  York. 

[50] 


up  into  the  management  of  an  arms  corporation,  gets 
to  the  top,  marries  the  daughter  of  the  president, 
and  faces  life  on  a  spiritual  plane  where  keenness 
and  efficiency  alone  are  not  enough.  After  a  few 
years  of  life  on  the  terms  that  his  wife  predicates, 
McPherson  sees  a  chance  to  have  himself  count  in  a 
consolidation  that  will  require  him  to  eliminate  his 
wife's  bombastic  father  if  he  is  to  go  through.  He 
does  go  through  and  his  wife  leaves  him.  The  rest 
of  the  story  is  fabulous  success  followed  by  degen- 
eration, then  by  a  revolutionary  attempt  to  reach  hap- 
piness and  significance,  and  finally  by  an  acceptance 
of  a  common  lot. 

One  hardly  needs  to  be  told  that  this  is  the  work 
of  a  new  novelist.  Although  it  embodies  a  wisdom 
of  experience  not  often  traceable  in  a  beginner's  fic- 
tion, it  has  a  freshness  that  belongs  to  the  spring- 
time of  creation.  It  is  not  merely  a  novel  of  per- 
sonal fortunes.  It  is  a  novel  of  the  meaning  of  life. 
Where  a  more  practiced  novelist  might  have  been 
content  to  tell  a  story,  Mr.  Anderson  has  sought  to 
give  expression  to  those  long  thoughts  which  so 
enamor  the  young  novelist,  which  so  often  break  in 
the  weaving  like  a  gossamer  too  thin  to  be  spun. 
In  his  failure  as  well  as  in  his  success  Mr.  Anderson 
has  gone  far  beyond  most  of  his  contemporaries. 
Where  he  has  failed,  that  is  to  say,  he  has  proved 
a  larger  genuineness  than  most  of  his  contemporaries 
prove  by  their  success.  This  failure  is  not,  of 
course,  a  warranty  that  Mr.  Anderson  is  now  a 
Great  Novelist,  and  so  on.  But  it  is  part  of  that 
bravery  of  the  spirit  without  which  no  novel  can  be 
incorporated  by  its  reader. 

If  Windy  McPherson's  Son  is  not  successfully 
[  5i  1 


genuine  all  through,  it  is  perhaps  because  of  Mr. 
Anderson's  zealousness  to  project  all  of  a  destiny. 
Knowing  quite  thoroughly  the  man  who  is  out  to 
win,  self-made,  combative,  daring,  shrewd,  self-re- 
liant, strong,  Mr.  Anderson  appears  to  have  wanted 
to  give  him  his  climax  at  any  cost,  for  the  sake  of  the 
downfall  afterward.  With  that  in  mind,  Mr.  An- 
derson was  satisfied  to  represent  rather  thinly  and 
poorly  the  relations  between  Sue  Rainey  and  Sam 
i  McPherson.  Sue  Rainey  is  excellently  described  in 
the  exacerbation  of  her  first  tragic  pregnancy,  and 
its  effect  on  her  husband's  ideal  of  her  is  well  imag- 
ined. But  what  one  most  wants,  Sue's  version  of 
herself  in  her  relation  to  this  mailed  warrior,  is  not 
completely  realized.  Of  course,  we  have  at  the 
start  the  formula  of  their  relations.  She  says : 

"  I  am  wealthy.  You  are  able  and  you  have  a  kind  of 
undying  energy  in  you.  I  want  to  give  both  my  wealth  and 
your  ability  to  children  —  our  children.  That  will  not  be 
easy  for  you.  It  means  giving  up  your  dreams  of  power. 
Perhaps  I  shall  lose  courage.  Women  do  after  two  or  three 
have  come.  You  will  have  to  furnish  that.  You  will  have 
to  make  a  mother  of  me  and  keep  making  a  mother  of  me. 
You  will  have  to  be  a  new  kind  of  father  with  something 
maternal  in  you.  You  will  have  to  be  patient  and  studious 
and  kind.  You  will  have  to  think  of  these  things  at  night 
instead  of  thinking  of  your  own  advancement.  You  will 
have  to  live  wholly  for  me  because  I  am  to  be  their  mother, 
giving  me  your  strength  and  courage  and  your  good  sane 
outlook  on  things.  And  then  when  they  come  you  will 
have  to  give  all  these  things  to  them  day  after  day  in  a 
thousand  little  ways." 

Waiving  the  question  of  Sanrs  ability  to  give  his 
ability  to  his  children,  there  is  much  difficulty  about 

[  52  ] 


believing  that  any  Sue  could  say  this  to  any  Sam. 
Granted  that  it  is  an  accurate  formula,  that  it  ex- 
presses what  every  woman  is  supposed  to  feel,  it 
reads  much  more  like  an  author's  reasoned  memo- 
randum than  like  a  girl's  actual  announcement. 

This  speech  is  a  fair  example  of  a  common  kind  of 
novelistic  speech  that  does  not  seem  to  have  the  tex- 
ture of  life.  Even  if  the  critic  is  wrong  in  thinking 
that  a  woman  seldom  has  so  conscious  a  programme 
for  the  selection  and  direction  of  her  confederate  in 
the  solemn  responsibilities  of  procreation,  there  is 
still  the  question  whether  she  would  disclose  her  pur- 
pose, or  purposes,  to  the  person  she  is  about  to  nomi- 
nate. In  these  matters  human  beings  vary  mon- 
strously, but  they  are  more  than  likely  to  proceed  by 
indirection,  especially  in  bourgeois  Chicago  in  the 
early  stages  of  a  love  affair  between  a  boy  from  Iowa 
and  a  girl  in  the  fashionable  society  of  1890  or  there- 
abouts. And  if  the  reader  has  at  all  the  conviction 
that  indirectness  is  the  human  process  in  these  matters 
of  sensibility  and  amenity,  he  gets  less  than  nothing 
of  personal  character  and  temperament  and  intona- 
tion from  a  novelist  who  hurries  his  plot  by  putting 
in  such  a  quickener.  There  is  no  special  point  in  the 
directness  of  such  speeches.  Mr.  Anderson  proffers 
them  as  if  they  had  the  pure  accent  of  ordinary  man- 
kind. But  if  a  woman  could  say  a  thing  like  this 
to  her  lover,  from  herself  and  not  out  of  a  book,  she 
would  be  entitled  to  a  novel  all  by  her  lonesome  — 
or  entitled  to  another  Man  and  Superman.  The 
attentive  ear  does  not  often  record  these  utterances; 
and  between  them  and  the  utterances  to  which  a 
novelist  like  Arnold  Bennett  gives  sanction  there  is 
a  difference  not  merely  of  attention.  There  is  that 

[53  ] 


infinitesimal  yet  marvelous  difference  that  lifts  the 
inorganic  to  the  organic.  To  be  said  to  live,  a  fic- 
tional personality  must  not  only  come  from  a  gener- 
ative artist,  it  must  be  integrated  out  of  the  mate- 
rials •  of  a  world  actually  possessed.  And  where 
there  is  any  failure  of  knowing  and  caring,  as  here 
suggested,  there  is  only  a  bluff  at  creation.  It  is  a 
bluff,  curiously  enough,  which  Americans  rather 
despise  Englishmen  and  Frenchmen  and  Russians  for 
taking  such  enormous  pains  to  avoid,  pains  that  are 
against  all  the  philosophy  of  being  in  business  for 
profit.  Living  in  a  day  of  business  enterprise  when 
real  rewards  may  be  gained  by  goods  that  are  just 
made  to  market,  Americans  see  no  great  reason  for 
severe  integrity  in  the  art  of  fiction.  And  yet  with- 
out such  integrity,  the  kind  that  makes  the  Five 
Towns  true  to  the  experience  of  two  continents,  there 
is  no  more  vitality  in  a  novel  than  there  was  in  those 
deceptive  blue  birds  described  by  Maeterlinck. 

The  point  about  Windy  McPherson's  Son,  how- 
ever, is  its  liberal  suggestion  of  a  new  integrity  in 
the  American  novel.  Eloquent  as  the  characters  are 
in  Caxton  —  the  verbal  dandy,  the  mad  Irishman, 
the  schoolteacher  nipped  by  scandal,  the  revivalist, 
the  woman  burdened  by  a  veteran  yearning  over  a 
thousand  battles  never  fought  —  they  are  only  part 
of  the  suggestive  wealth  of  the  story.  Symbolic  as 
Sam's  wanderings  are,  and  meagre  and  personal  as 
his  Research  is,  there  is  a  continual  flood  of  human- 
ity, American  humanity,  through  sincere  and  exciting 
pages.  And  for  all  the  traces  of  the  beginner's  art, 
there  is  the  virtue  of  unexpectedness  in  the  story,  the 
supreme  quality  of  the  organism  which  a  story  should 
have. 

[54] 


The  final  impression  of  Windy  McPherson's  Son 
is  one  of  poetic  power.  Although  Mr.  Anderson 
has  a  clean  veracity  about  sex  his  version  of  the  re- 
lations between  men  and  women  is  rather  cramped. 
He  records  the  estrangement  between  the  sexes  with 
some  bitterness.  But  his  novel  as  a  whole  has  less 
bitterness  than  one  might  expect  from  a  man  who 
has  become  a  novelist  in  the  artistic  orphanage  of 
the  industrial  Middle  West.  To  have  refused  all 
fostering  from  the  English  and  French  masters,  to 
have  seen  Iowa  and  Chicago  for  himself,  exhibits  in 
high  degree  that  courage  in  isolation  which  is  the 
heavy  price  of  breaking  new  ground.  That  price 
Mr.  Anderson  has  paid.  In  his  succinct  and  quick- 
moving  novel  he  has  made  the  America  of  the  small 
town  his  own,  its  stridencies  and  heart-hungers  and 
thin  spiral  fires.  He  has  traced  the  small  town's 
tribute  to  Chicago  and  other  confluences  of  native 
hope  and  greed  and  desire.  The  modern  business 
enterprise  that  is,  from  the  spiritual  side,  so  often 
warfare  without  a  programme  or  a  principle,  Mr. 
Anderson  has  not  accepted  conventionally.  If  there 
is  a  sign  of  conventionality,  it  is  more  in  the  attempts 
McPherson  later  makes  to  join  in  a  social  move- 
ment that  will  give  meaning  to  his  life. 

Mr.  Sherwood  Anderson's  name  is  likely  to  be- 
come familiar  to  readers  of  American  fiction.  Out 
of  the  slag-heap,  as  the  romancers  see  it,  he  has  ex- 
tracted a  veracious  novel.  He  has  shown  how  the 
will-to-power  works  in  the  American,  how  American 
enterprise  can  satiate  its  Hindenburgs  and  Kitcheners 
and  greater  war-lords  of  civil  life.  He  has  also 
shown  the  limitations  of  this  will-to-power,  as  the 
romancer  must  refrain  from  showing  it.  By  such 

[  55  ] 


verity  and  by  the  breath  of  the  spirit  that  flows 
through  it  Windy  McPherson's  Son  is  romantic,  as 
all  life  is  romantic,  even  the  one-eyed  Cyclopean  life 
of  monied  success. 

January  20, 


[56] 


TO  AMERICAN  WORKINGMEN 

IT  is  Mr.  Sherwood  Anderson's  distinction  in 
Marching  Men  that  he  summons  the  rawest  Ameri- 
can people,  brutal  in  their  callous  acceptance  of  their 
own  ugly  and  shoddy  material  condition,  flaccid  in 
their  personal  tastes  and  futile  in  their  spurts  to 
escape  from  banality,  barbarous  in  their  solemnity 
about  trivial  things  and  their  levity  about  serious 
ones,  cruel  in  their  enforcement  of  submissiveness 
and  their  drunken  explosions  against  it,  anarchic  in 
their  relation  to  any  sustained  purpose  outside  the 
immediacies  of  their  food  and  shelter,  their  women 
and  their  progeny. 

Having  possessed  himself  of  the  vast  part  of  the 
life  of  the  vast  proportion  of  the  American  people, 
Mr.  Anderson  wanted  to  do  something  besides  rep- 
resent its  disorder  and  brutality  and  ineffectiveness. 
He  wanted  to  show  how  it  could  be  led.  It  is  the 
failure  of  his  book,  as  I  see  it,  that  he  has  made  his 
hero  a  primordial  figure  about  whom  he  is  clearly 
infatuated.  The  sensational  and  spectacular  scheme 
by  which  this  Pennsylvania  miner  aspires  to  evoke  the 
solidarity  of  labor  hardly  succeeds  in  escaping  the 
ludicrous.  But  Marching  Men  is  not  a  literal  novel. 
It  has,  indeed,  its  large  element  of  the  caveman 
piffle  that  played  such  a  part  in  the  romanticizations 
of  Jack  London,  but  outside  this  puerility,  this  day- 
dream of  the  male  egoist,  there  is  a  great  deal  of  in- 
Marching  Men,  by  Sherwood  Anderson.  John  Lane,  New  Yorfc. 
[57] 


spiring  symbolism  in  Marching  Men,  and  it  is  jus- 
tifiably dedicated  to  American  workingmen.  Per- 
haps, as  the  success  of  Jack  London  intimates,  it  is 
necessary  in  the  novel  of  the  proletarian  to  repro- 
duce for  modern  hero-worship  the  simple  Herculean 
giant  who  invariably  downs  his  enemy.  It  is  not 
the  prowess  of  McGregor  that  makes  Marching  Men 
a  living  presence,  however,  so  much  as  the  freshness 
of  feeling  about  workingmen  and  women,  the  vividly 
frank  and  abrupt  opinions,  the  flashes  of  energetic 
description,  the  perverse  notions  concerning  women, 
the  details  of  mining  town  and  apple-warehouse  and 
night  restaurant  and  Chicago  pulchritude,  the  remi- 
niscence of  1893  and  of  First  Ward  infamies,  the 
swiftness  of  incident.  Mr.  Anderson's  subjects  are 
handled  with  a  verve  so  different  from  the  tired 
matrimonialism  of  the  professional  novelist  that  an 
occasional  naivete  is  unimportant.  Without  naivete 
he  would  probably  not  have  had  the  courage  to  write 
so  graphic  a  proletarian  novel. 

"  Huge,  graceless  of  body,  indolent  of  mind,  un- 
trained, uneducated,  hating  the  world,"  McGregor 
is  the  young  American  whom  time  converts  from  a 
savage  disgust  with  workingmen  to  a  leadership  that 
is  ruthless  love  of  order. 

"  I  hate  you  because  you  are  disorganized  and  weak  like 
cattle.  I  would  like  to  come  among  you  teaching  the  power 
of  force.  I  would  like  to  slay  you  one  by  one,  not  with 
weapons  but  with  my  naked  fists.  If  they  have  made  you 
work  like  rats  buried  in  a  hole  they  are  right.  It  is  man's 
right  to  do  what  he  can.  Get  up  and  fight." 

This  is  the  spirit  that  dominates  McGregor  when 
he  is  the  joke  of  Coal  Creek,  "  Beaut  "  McGregor, 

[  58  ] 


son  of  "  Cracked "  McGregor.  But  besides  the 
quest  of  power  that  occupies  his  first  years  in  Chi- 
cago, an  ambition  that  regulates  his  sympathies  and 
his  passions,  there  is  a  self-identification  with  tfye 
working  class  by  which  his  hatred  is  merely  the  ob- 
verse of  his  love.  His  success  as  a  lawyer  gives  him 
a  chance  to  leave  his  class,  but  his  sense  of  solidarity 
prevails,  and  the  rest  of  his  struggle  is  a  struggle  to 
make  an  army  out  of  labor  by  progress  from  the 
mere  rhythm  of  marching  to  a  rhythm  of  like- 
mindedness  in  society. 

There  are  hints  of  the  Peter  of  War  and  Peace 
in  the  figure  of  Mr.  Anderson's  McGregor,  but  it 
is  only  necessary  to  mention  a  Tolstoyan  hero  to 
mark  the  rudimentary  portraiture  of  the  American. 
He  is  not,  primarily,  an  independent  will.  He  is  a 
purposeful  creation  of  the  author.  We  are  intro- 
duced inside  him,  but  only  to  discover  that  he  is  all 
of  a  piece,  as  simple  as  a  sun-dial,  and  the  mecha- 
nism by  which  he  works  requires  a  light  from  out- 
side. His  treatment  in  Coal  Creek  does  supply 
some  real  motivation,  and  there  are  symptoms  of 
spontaneous  human  nature  in  his  relations  with  the 
undertaker's  daughter,  the  milliner,  the  fashionable 
Chicagoan.  But  there  is  something  about  his  devo- 
tion to  a  love  of  order,  his  recurrence  to  his  simple 
sententiousness,  that  suggests  a  cuckoo-clock.  The 
only  way  to  overcome  the  difficulty  of  establishing 
an  idea  in  a  novel  is  to  humanize  every  expression  of 
its  sponsor.  This  is  not  Mr.  Anderson's  way.  His 
McGregor  uniformly  knocks  men  down,  uniformly 
hates,  uniformly  suppresses  women,  uniformly 
spouts.  He  is  fervid  but  rigid,  a  romancer's  man. 

The  chief  fact  about  Marching  Men  is  not,  how- 
[59] 


ever,  its  rhetoric,  its  grandiloquence.  It  is  its  ap- 
prehension of  the  great  fictional  theme  of  our  gener- 
ation, industrial  America.  Because  the  subject  is 
barbarous,  anarchic  and  brutal  it  is  not  easy  for  its 
story  to  be  told.  But  the  restless  vitality  of  the 
thing  itself  is  beginning  to  be  felt,  through  layers 
of  professorial  censorship.  Harsh  voices,  wild 
tongues  of  fire,  ominous  multitudinous  mutterings, 
are  at  last  striving  up  our  horizon. 

One  is  induced  in  reading  Marching  Men  to 
theorize  on  the  enormous  gap  between  literate  and 
unliterate  America.  The  novel's  weakness  in  throw- 
ing a  rainbow  across  the  gulf  is  a  sign  of  the  sun- 
dered realities.  The  explanation  lies,  perhaps,  in, 
man's  faculty  for  ignoring  the  obvious,  his  great  gift 
for  evading  glaring  fact.  It  is  not  obtuseness  that 
makes  the  chauffeur  ignore  hitching-posts  or  makes 
the  admirer  of  Elihu  Root  fail  to  see  the  importance 
of  Bill  Haywood.  It  is  a  difference  of  purpose.  It 
seems  to  be  the  necessity  and  the  penalty  of  jealous 
purpose  to  compel  the  evasion  of  glaring  fact,  to 
delete  unacceptable  fact  from  consideration.  The 
youth  who  lives  in  a  boarding-house  can  walk  his  city 
for  ever  without  seeing  carpenters'  shops  or  plumb- 
ers', groceries  or  meats,  and  his  blindness  is  not  that 
he  cannot  see  these  agencies  of  life  but  that  he  has 
no  sufficient  motive  for  seeing.  We  cannot  observe, 
apparently,  unless  we  expand  our  purposes  to  make 
a  place  for  attendant  fact.  If  fact  is  stubborn  and 
we  are  not  ready  for  it,  there  is  every  category  of 
morals  and  taste  to  be  enlisted  to  side-track  it.  The 
imagination  is  much  more  connected  with  will,  much 
more  the  servant  of  habit  and  circumstance,  than 
we  are  accustomed  to  admit.  The  first  step  in  edu- 

[  60  ] 


eating  the  imagination,  indeed,  is  to  remind  our- 
selves that  the  shutter  remains  on  the  camera  so 
long  as  we  do  not  will  to  perceive. 

By  reason  of  these  restrictions,  it  seems  to  me,  the 
proletarian  has  had  small  place  in  American  fiction. 
Under  the  ban  of  negligible  ugliness,  as  the  eminent 
novelists  see  it,  comes  the  great  majority  of  the  peo- 
ple. They,  the  eminent  ones,  have  principally  been 
the  children  of  circumspect  parents,  Presbyterians  or 
Baptists,  middle  class  in  social  and  moral  habits  and 
unlikely  to  be  hospitable  to  the  primordial.  Outside 
their  view  lies  the  life  of  the  proletarian  except  as  it 
impinges  on  the  middle  class,  and  these  rawnesses  of 
American  existence,  so  conceived,  have  as  little  part 
in  a  polite  literacy  as  have  peanuts  in  the  poetry  of 
Oscar  Wilde.  It  is  not  that  the  facts  are  seen  and 
rejected.  The  facts  are  simply  not  open  to  the  emi- 
nent novelists  any  more  than  to  social-sentiment 
workers  or  bright  reporters  or  class-hyphenates  of 
the  sweetest  disposition.  The  proletarians  are  in  a 
different  universe  of  discourse,  and  one  so  unthink- 
able to  eminent  novelists  that  is  promptly  ruled  out, 
the  way  we  humane  people  rule  out  the  superheated 
hell. 

Where  Marching  Men  succeeds  is  in  thrusting  the 
greater  American  realities  before  us,  seen  as  by  a 
workingman  himself.  It  is  a  fragmentary  novel, 
rhetorical  in  the  atmosphere  that  surrounds  Mc- 
Gregor and  uncritical  of  its  own  notion  of  solidarity, 
but  a  narrative  that  suggests  the  presence  in  our  fic- 
tion of  a  man  who  knows  our  largest  theme. 

September  29,  1917. 

[61  ] 


NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  2 


GEORGE  MEREDITH 

THERE  is  not  the  slightest  chance  that  the  last 
of  George  Meredith's  writings  will  be  popular.  As 
it  stands,  a  block  from  which  the  figures  have 
scarcely  begun  to  emerge,  Celt  and  Saxon  is  not  even 
certain  to  attract  loyal  Meredithians.  To  unfin- 
ished novels  most  of  us  are  honestly  averse,  and  this 
one  is  definitely  unfinished.  Yet  it  would  be  dull 
not  to  ask  for  it  the  greatest  possible  prominence. 
It  is  characteristic  and  worthy  of  Meredith;  it  de- 
serves the  consideration  of  every  one  who  knows 
what  "  Meredith  "  means. 

The  unfinished  novel  is  discouraging  because  it 
loses  the  virtue  of  plot,  but  this  is  a  minor  loss  in  the 
case  of  the  most  engaging  of  psychologists.  As  a 
maker  of  plots  Meredith  was  a  limping  hero.  It  is 
notorious  that  he  was  deficient  in  the  craft  of  story- 
telling, and  Celt  and  Saxon  will  cause  no  one  to  ap- 
peal this  verdict. 

If  Meredith's  mind  were  not  of  such  startling  and 
delightful  quality,  it  would  be  affectation  to  recom- 
mend Celt  and  Saxon.  There  is  no  use  pretending 
that  his  limitations  as  a  story-teller  were  not  serious. 
They  are  one  of  the  causes  of  an  unpopularity  which 
is  never  likely  to  be  overcome.  A  plot,  after  all,  is 
a  design  to  which  everything  else  must  be  subordi- 
nated if  the  reader's  attention  is  to  be  enticed  and 
enthralled.  Rude  life  may  not  conform  to  this  de- 
Celt  and  Saxon,  by  George  Meredith.  Scribners,  New  York. 
[65] 


sign,  and  the  psychologist  may  despise  it,  yet  there 
is  no  such  thing  as  a  good  novel  that  has  not  a  good 
plot.  The  difficulty  in  Meredith  seems  to  be  a  diffi- 
culty of  sheer  intellectual  exuberance.  Time  after 
time  he  starts  honestly  spinning  his  yarn,  but  as  he 
warms  to  his  task  he  becomes  intoxicated  by  his  own 
cerebration,  and  as  he  yields  to  his  passion  for  vital 
comment  on  life  his  plot  goes  hang.  If  events 
march  forward  in  his  stories,  they  also  halt  for  hours 
at  a  time,  to  suit  the  author's  convenience.  For  the 
distracted  reader  he  has  no  bowels  of  mercy.  Like 
many  brilliant  men,  he  will  be  enjoyed  on  his  own 
terms  or  not  at  all. 

In  the  patriotic  Irish  view,  Celt  and  Saxon  is  not 
entirely  satisfactory.  To  a  man  who  loved  Eng- 
land as  Meredith  loved  it  there  was  something  gro- 
tesque in  the  extremist  Irish  view.  To  him  the  dif- 
ferences between  England  and  Ireland  were  differ- 
ences not  as  to  union  itself,  but  as  to  the  terms  of 
union.  He  could  not,  as  a  man  of  common  sense, 
conceive  the  passionate  individualism  of  Ireland,  its 
passionate  desire  to  be  divorced  from  the  empire,  to 
be  "a  nation  once  again."  In  a  beautiful  woman 
Meredith  would  have  understood  this  shrugging  har- 
ness: he  would  have  been  the  first  to  unbuckle  the 
harness  and  give  the  creature  her  way.  But  for  a 
feeble  people,  beaten  in  the  international  fight  for 
survival,  he  had  no  such  radical  sympathy.  He 
wrote,  in  short,  not  as  a  Celt,  but  as  a  Celt-and- 
Saxon.  He  wrote  in  the  great  faith  of  Imperialism, 
his  conning  tower  planted  at  Boxhill.  For  this  rea- 
son his  political  rendering  of  the  Irish  situation  is 
not  to  the  taste  of  the  Irish.  Meredith  did  not  know 
the  Beauchamps  of  modern  Ireland,  and  his  igno- 

[66] 


ranee  is  astonishingly  Saxon.  But  the  patriotic  Irish 
make  a  great  mistake  if  they  decry  this  book  on  po- 
litical grounds.  It  is,  after  all,  for  its  insight  into 
the  spiritual  constitution  of  the  Irish  that  it  is  valu- 
able. And  here,  as  always,  Meredith  is  supreme. 

It  is  characteristic  that  the  Irish  gentlemen  of  this 
novel  should  be  unrealistically  conceived.  His  Pat- 
rick O'Donnell  is  an  Irish  gentleman  educated  by 
the  Jesuits  in  France,  and  he  talks  like  no  Irishman 
that  ever  breathed.  He  talks  like  Meredith!  And 
yet,  under  this  curious  lingo  of  Meredith  masquerad- 
ing in  a  brogue,  the  spirit  of  an  Irishman  is  flaming. 
The  same  applies  to  Con  and  Philip.  In  each  case 
the  lamp  is  Meredithian,  but  the  fire  is  Irish.  It  is 
precisely  as  if  the  novelist  were  an  actor  unable  to 
mimic  but  able  to  convey  and  inspire  the  emotion. 

To  John  Bull  the  Irishman  is  a  mercurial  creature, 
as  unstable  as  he  is  impressionable.  It  is  balsam  to 
an  Irishman  to  find  that  Meredith  understands  this 
temperament,  and  does  not  judge  it  with  Marcus 
Aurelius  for  text.  To  Marcus  Aurelius  the  highest 
English  ideal  conforms  —  the  ideal  that  Meredith 
himself  maintained  in  Redworth  and  the  protagonist 
of  Sir  Willoughby.  But  Meredith  was  not  so  stoic 
as  to  admire  only  those  Irishmen  who  approximate 
Englishmen.  He  conceived,  as  few  English  do,  the 
difference  between  character  and  stolidity.  He  con- 
ceived the  difference  between  admirable  self-posses- 
sion and  English  imperturbable  self-will.  Knowing 
the  Irish  chameleon  as  well  as  the  British  bull,  he 
was  yet  quick  to  recognize  in  the  finer  Celt  a  quality 
of  imagination  and  prehension  in  which  the  Saxon  is 
lacking.  The  charm  of  this  quality  Meredith  not 
only  observes :  he  represents  it.  His  Patrick  O'Don- 

[  6?  J 


nell  incarnates  this  social  genius.  He  has  the  wit, 
the  tenderness,  the  naivete  and  the  cajolery  which 
make  an  Irishman  as  different  from  an  Englishman 
as  water  is  different  from  earth.  And  one  is  allured 
by  Meredith's  double  reflection  of  his  characters  — 
his  mirror  of  Ireland  in  the  English  mind  and  of 
England  in  the  Irish.  In  his  chapter  on  John  Bull, 
on  that  grunter  and  guzzler  whom  he  so  loathed, 
there  is  sharp  criticism  of  his  own  people  to  balance 
his  satire  of  the  bamboozling  Captain  Con.  This 
chapter  and  a  similar  one  on  journalism  have  his 
true  magnetic  touch. 

Celt  and  Saxon  has  some  delicious  phrases.  "  He 
was  tall,  and  had  clear  Greek  outlines:  the  lips  were 
locked  metal,  thin  as  edges  of  steel."  In  the  house 
of  this  frigid  gentleman,  there  was  among  the  heir- 
looms "  a  shirt  of  coarse  linen  with  a  pale  brown  spot 
on  the  breast,  like  a  fallen  beech  leaf."  To  Wells,  I 
am  afraid,  that  would  have  been  something  sharp 
and  journalistic  —  an  A.  B.  C.  shop  tea  stain. 
*'  Bull's  perusal  of  the  Horatian  '  carpe  diem  '  is 
acute  as  that  of  the  cattle  in  fat  meads."  And  what 
of  John  Bull's  attitude  toward  Meredith  himself,  the 
"  simple  starveling  piper  "  ?  It  is  Bull, 

your  all  for  animal  pleasure  in  the  holiday  he  devours 
and  cannot  enjoy,  whose  example  teaches  you  to  shun  the 
plaguey  tale  that  carries  fright;  and  so  you  find  him  sour 
at  business  and  sick  of  his  relaxings,  hating  both  because  he 
harnesses  himself  in  turn  bestially  to  each,  growling  at  the 
smallest  admixture  of  them,  when,  if  he  would  but  chirp 
a  little  over  his  work,  and  allow  his  pleasures  to  inspire  a 
dose  of  thoughtf ulness,  he  would  be  happier,  and  —  who 
knows — become  a  brighter  fellow,  one  to  be  rescued  from 
the  pole-ax. 

[68  ] 


Having  quoted  such  typical  phrases  as  these,  it 
seems  strange  to  admit  the  unpopularity  of  Mere- 
dith. And  yet  he  is  admired  and  loved,  by  but  a 
few.  With  gifts  prodigious  and  an  excess  of  that 
rare  genius  called  temperament,  he  is  thrown  away 
by  most  readers  as  a  nut  not  worth  cracking.  His 
writing  is  felt  to  be  strained  and  unnatural,  and  by 
some  table  thumpers  is  denounced  as  effeminate. 
He  cannot  be  called  degenerate,  because  the  prankt 
flowers  he  displays  are  not  poisonous,  yet  had  Mere- 
dith discussed  the  blacker  arts  of  life  he  would  un- 
doubtedly be  known  as  a  degenerate  writer,  a  deca- 
dent. As  it  is,  people  who  do  not  look  inward  do 
not  like  him.  And  even  his  admirers  are  sometimes 
at  a  loss  to  explain  why,  in  spite  of  his  patent  limita- 
tions, they  discern  in  him  one  of  the  few  great  spirits, 
a  spirit  in  whose  light  the  petty  dwindles  and  the 
shameful  shrinks  away,  one  whose  art  was  but  the 
faulty  medium  of  a  soul  that  itself  had  triumphed  in 
exceeding  trial,  and  came  out  a  sharp  comedian,  one 
who  staunchly  accepted  his  burden,  knowing  it  would 
always  be  as  light  as  the  heart  that  bore  it. 

It  was  not  by  virtue  of  animal  spirits  that  Mere- 
dith was  a  comedian.  His  is  comedy  of  the  intel- 
lect, the  only  comedy  possible  to  a  creature  so  sensi- 
tized. Men  are  born  either  with  red  blood  in  their 
veins  or  blue  blood.  They  are  born  either  with  the 
flesh  and  genial  emotions  predominating  or  the  spirit 
and  brains  predominating.  To  my  mind  Meredith 
was  essentially  blue-blooded,  but  he  was  too  great  a 
man,  too  much  of  a  genius  to  become  a  type.  Genius 
miraculously  transfuses  the  bloods  genial  and  criti- 
cal. It  embraces  the  world,  and  understands  all 
things.  In  Meredith  there  was  no  urging  of  an 

[  69  ] 


Aristocratic  code.  He  was  as  truly  a  natural  man 
as  the  reddest  teamster.  But  in  him  so  many  ele- 
ments were  raging,  there  was  so  much  "  wind  and 
fire,"  there  was  such  complexity  of  nerve  and  sym- 
pathy and  egoism  and  morality  and  passion,  that  it 
took  a  million-handed  style  to  perform  the  perfectly 
honest  and  representative  expression  that  he  desired. 
Where  many  ideas  are  candidates  for  expression, 
there  will  sometimes  be  an  uproar  which  no  chairman 
can  dominate.  Meredith's  brain  was  so  fertile  that 
its  activity  was  almost  inflammatory,  and  he  did  not 
always  observe  parliamentary  rules.  As  a  result  his 
novels  are  dazzlingly  intellectual,  but  likely  to  addle 
our  brains  unless  we  learn  his  method.  That  he 
had  a  method,  that  he  understood  life  and  art  deeply, 
that  he  included  within  himself  ten  thousand  men  and 
women,  seems  to  me  invincibly  true.  Celt  and  Saxon  . 
itself  shows  an  understanding  of  character  not  to  be 
paralleled  in  the  writings  of  Englishmen  or  Irishmen. 
Read  Trollope's  mutton-headed  writings  about  the 
Irish  and  compare  them  with  this.  See  what  Lever 
wrote  with  a  pen  dipped  in  Irish  whisky,  and  con- 
trast it  with  Meredith's  reading  of  the  Celt,  a  read- 
ing that  sees  in  rollicking  Con  something  more  than 
human  vaudeville.  Vaudeville  there  is  in  Mere- 
dith's Con,  but  a  vaudeville  in  which  all  of  us  sits 
in  audience,  not  a  vaudeville  in  which  your  common 
sense  has  been  deposited  in  the  cloakroom  and  your 
sense  of  decency  been  thrust  under  the  seat.  It  is 
because  Meredith  never  bromides  his  brain  that  so 
many  people  resent  him  —  they  whose  brains  are 
still  in  the  condition  of  winter  pears.  And  in  resent- 
ing his  brilliance  they  foolishly  deny  him  depth  and 
fundamental  feeling. 

[  70] 


Perhaps  the  greatest  reason  why  Meredith  can- 
not be  popular  is  deficiency  in  commonplace.  This  is 
at  once  his  supreme  virtue  and  his  most  serious  de- 
fect. There  is  nothing  commonplace  about  him, 
neither  his  way  of  saying  things,  nor  the  things  he 
says,  nor  the  people  he  conceives,  nor  the  surround- 
ings he  conceives  them  in.  He  abhors  the  literal,  he 
ignores  it.  His  whole  manner  of  regarding  com- 
monplace fact  is  oblique.  He  can  reveal  the  life  ef- 
fect of  a  moment's  shiftiness  in  one  lightning  phrase, 
yet  he  will  write  about  an  aristocrat's  leg  in  language 
so  symbolic  and  circumlocutory  that  you  pine  to  own 
the  leg  yourself,  with  a  boot  on  it.  Meredith  writes 
about  commonplace  people  as  he  might  write  about 
cows  and  sheep.  To  him  they  are  a  race  apart,  in- 
teresting no  doubt  and  reasoning  as  well  as  instinc- 
tive (so  professors  say)  but  not  of  his  ilk.  The 
novelist  was,  of  course,  a  democrat.  But  he  did  not 
love  the  masses  the  way  Whitman  loved  them.  He 
could  not  have  flung  open  his  spiritual  house  and  let 
the  crowds  trample  through  him,  after  the  fashion 
of  Balzac  and  Tolstoy.  He  could  not  have  vul- 
garized himself  for  the  sake  of  those  very  people 
whom  he  beheld  as  the  object  of  all  government  and 
civilizing.  Inclusive  in  his  philosophy  and  inclusive 
in  his  understanding,  he  was  exclusive  in  his  wit  and 
in  his  taste.  His  mind,  indeed,  was  peopled  with  a 
nobility  infinitely  better  bred  and  accomplished  than 
any  that  exists  in  England.  His  sublimation  of 
Queen  Victoria  was  typical  —  he  had  to  sublimate, 
and  the  best  media  for  his  uncommonplace  concep- 
tion of  life  were  the  ladies  and  gentlemen  of  old 
England.  Such  ladies  and  gentlemen !  Had  a  man 
of  less  genius  tried  to  sublimate  them  he  would  have 


been  culpably  sentimental  and  snobbish.  Meredith 
was  neither  —  his  brain  happened  to  be  a  eugenic 
brain,  that  is  all,  and  the  creatures  that  emanated 
therefrom  were  eugenically  delivered. 

The  absence  of  commonplace  in  Meredith  is  not 
wholly  a  virtue.  No  novelist  can  hope  to  reach 
many  people  who  does  not  include  and  dwell  upon 
the  familiar  affairs  of  men,  the  common  drudgeries 
as  well  as  the  high  emotions.  In  Meredith  we  live 
with  our  superiors,  people  in  whom  there  is  dross, 
but  not  our  dross,  people  whose  mental  and  spiritual 
pace  is  swift,  and  whose  motives  are  rarefied.  Such 
people  exist,  worthy  of  such  a  master.  But  to  live 
with  one's  superiors  is  trying  —  no  wonder  people 
shrink  from  Meredith's  galaxy.  The  mere  splendor 
of  such  life  repels  one,  as  one  would  be  repelled  by 
ten  hours  of  continuous  Beethoven.  Our  nerves 
wince  at  such  strumming,  exquisite  though  it  be. 
We  long  for  rye  bread  and  beer  and  the  reassurance 
of  dull  companions.  We  long  for  earth  under  our 
feet,  after  soaring.  We  want  leave  to  relax  and 
even  dissipate.  Meredith  expects  too  much  of  us  — 
and  of  himself.  His  will  is  ever-present.  Never 
pathological,  he  is  still  incessantly  introspective  and 
critical.  He  has  little  in  common  with  happy  ro- 
mantics like  Barrie,  who  has  the  heart  of  a  child. 
Meredith  is  least  of  all  simple  and  sensational.  If 
he  climbs  physical  Alps  it  is  a  spiritual  excitement 
and  adventure.  Skeptical  in  all  matters  of  religion, 
he  employs  his  intellect  on  everything,  and  retains 
sanity  only  because  it  is  so  stupid  to  be  insane. 

In  all  of  the  novels  one  is  struck  again  and  again 
by  the  purity  of  Meredith's  interests,  his  extraordi- 
nary sublimation  in  a  world  that  so  shrinks  from  the 

[  72  ] 


sublime.  But  however  difficult  it  may  be  to  breathe 
in  these  altitudes  of  Meredith,  however  difficult  to 
fraternize  with  his  women  and  men,  however  hard 
to  accept  his  recondite  wit,  let  us  at  least  not  be  so 
stupid  as  to  assume  that  his  sublimation  has  in  it  any 
fear  of  life.  Meredith  holds  himself  superior  to 
nothing  natural,  but  he  makes  strict  terms  with  life, 
and  he  keeps  his  side  of  the  bargain.  Aware  of  the 
thousand  disguises  in  which  we  entertain  the  bestial 
man,  he  detects  him  and  keeps  him  in  control.  That 
is  a  great  part  of  his  secret,  of  his  magnificent  hard- 
ness, of  his  keenness  and  his  intellectual  zest. 

September  9,  JQIO. 


HENRY  JAMES 

VERY  slight  has  been  the  notice  bestowed,  up  to 
the  present,  on  Mr.  Henry  James's  new  stories. 
They  are  accepted  by  the  reviewers  just  as  "  more 
James,"  without  much  reference  to  what  the 
"James "  part  of  the  statement  stands  for.  A 
newer  talent  of  equal  piquancy  might  arouse  more 
excitement.  But  this  particular  talent,  just  because 
it  is  guaranteed,  is  slighted  even  as  might  be  slighted 
the  unassertive  devotion  of  a  valuable  friend.  Mr. 
James  does  not  startle,  as  inspired  genius  startles. 
He  merely  goes  on  being  his  peculiar  and  immensely 
clever  self;  and  for  the  savoring  of  this  self  few  re- 
viewers seem  to  have  kept  keen. 

Why  so  few  people  were,  in  the  first  place,  keen 
about  Mr.  James  is  too  easy  to  see.  A  younger 
novelist,  but  one  of  more  powerful  literary  character, 
came  out  the  other  day  with  a  downright  and  crush- 
ing summary  of  the  obvious  limitations  of  Mr. 
James.  "  He  is  tremendously  lacking  in  emotional 
power."  That  was  the  first  item,  slapped  down  with 
a  journalistic  "tremendous."  "  Also  his  sense  of 
beauty  is  over  sophisticated  and  wants  originality. 
Also  his  attitude  toward  the  spectacle  of  life  is  at 
bottom  conventional,  timid  and  undecided.  Also  he 
seldom  chooses  themes  of  first-class  importance,  and 
when  he  does  choose  such  a  theme  he  never  fairly 
bites  it  and  makes  it  bleed.  Also  his  curiosity  is 

The  Finer  Grain,  by  Henry  J?™es.     Scribners,  New  York. 
L    74  ] 


limited."  It  is  because  many,  many  readers  besides 
Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  feel  exactly  these  deficiencies 
that  the  event  of  Mr.  James  is,  to  most  eyes,  no  more 
stimulating  than  a  chill  and  watery  dawn. 

One  admits  that  for  every  item  in  this  emphatic 
dictum  by  Mr.  Bennett  there  is,  from  the  standpoint 
of  Mr.  Bennett's  personal  requirements  in  fiction,  a 
sufficient  warrant.  Tested  on  The  Finer  Grain, 
every  one  of  these  judgments  is  found  to  be  valid, 
entirely  valid.  Emotionally  Mr.  James  is  feeble. 
He  is,  in  a  certain  sense,  inadequate.  That  is,  he 
fails  to  get  from  life  the  generous,  unpremeditated 
thrill,  which  is  the  splendor  of  life  —  or  if  he  gets 
it,  he  does  not  yield  to  it,  he  does  not  magnanimously 
and  whole-heartedly  communicate  it.  Here  Mr. 
James  is  distinguished  even  from  the  run  of  authors, 
in  his  unwillingness  to  let  his  emotions  carry  him  to 
sea,  in  his  intense  and  jealous  containment  of  self. 
He  is  incapable  either  of  relishing  or  of  practicing 
that  precise  kind  of  personal  mauling  which  Arnold 
Bennett  here  illustrates.  In  Mr.  James  there  are 
many  traits  of  the  sedate,  the  urbane,  the  playful, 
the  fastidious,  the  secretive,  the  luxurious,  the  epi- 
curean —  many  traits,  in  fine,  of  the  cat.  It  is  a 
cat  equally  without  civic  pride  and  republican  spirit 
and  without  the  anarchist's  divine  discontent.  It  is, 
as  it  were,  a  detached  bachelor  if  not  a  celibate  cat. 
It  is  a  cat  occupied  with  cream,  with  cushions,  with 
dry  and  pretty  peregrinations,  with  the  art  of  pleas- 
ing, and  the  art  of  being  pleased.  It  is  a  superior 
animal,  choice  in  its  friendships,  appreciative  but 
undemonstrative,  and  preserving  always  the  de- 
meanor of  spiritual  chastity. 

Such  an  animal  is  of  necessity  "  conventional, 
[  75  ] 


timid  and  undecided."  By  a  series  of  exquisite 
maneuvres,  of  gentle,  deft  unravelings,  of  patient 
persistences,  it  may  reach  the  heart  of  a  mystery,  and 
satisfy  a  curiosity  which,  if  limited,  is  sleepless. 
That,  in  the  end,  is  the  nature  of  the  creature.  To 
ask  of  such  a  creature  the  canine  virtues  is  to  ask 
that  a  diplomat  proceed  as  an  army  with  banners. 
It  is  legitimate  expression  of  preference,  but  it  is  not 
criticism. 

It  is  possible,  of  course,  for  cats  to  be  disap- 
pointing qua  cats.  But  what  Mr.  Bennett  sets  on 
the  debit  side  of  Mr.  James  seems  to  me  to  be  the 
very  essential  qualities  of  Mr.  James.  He  is  blam- 
ing the  cat  for  being  a  cat.  He  is  saying:  "  Ob- 
serve that  animal.  He  does  not  bark.  He  does 
not  leap  on  you,  friendly  and  vociferous.  He  does 
not  wag  his  tail.  He  does  not  bite.  He  does  not 
attack  the  burglar.  He  is  lamentably  timid.  As 
I  live,  it  ii  a  strange  dog !  I  swear  I  do  not  see  why 
he  wears  a  blue  ribbon." 

Criticising  Mr.  James  as  he  does,  it  is  evident 
that  Mr.  Bennett  is  not  predisposed,  in  any  event,  to 
the  feline.  But  not  every  one  is  so  limited.  And 
granting  that  Mr.  James  is  feline,  it  remains  also  to 
be  said  that  he  is  a  prince  among  felines.  He  is, 
after  all,  an  artist.  The  more  of  an  artist  he  is,  the 
more  he  develops  his  own  peculiar  attitude  toward 
life.  One  may  intensely  dislike  that  attitude.  One 
may  regard  it  as  pitifully  circumspect  and  drearily 
personal.  One  may  despise  it  for  its  apparent  ab- 
sence of  poetry,  of  public  spirit,  of  adventure,  of 
heroism.  But  it  is  an  honest,  a  sincere,  a  wonder- 
fully "  true  "  attitude.  The  point  is,  that  whether 
one  happens  to  like  or  dislike  Mr.  James's  self, 

[7.6] 


one  must  marvel  at  the  way  he  has  asserted  his 
right  to  himself.  Whatever  the  timidity,  the  con- 
vention, the  indecision  of  his  "  type,"  there  is  no 
timidity  in  his  acceptance,  his  marvelous  transcrip- 
tion of  the  type.  No  ideology  has  prevented  Mr. 
James  from  being  true  to  his  nature.  And  so,  if  one 
be  as  oddly  unedified  as  Mr.  Bennett  himself  by  that 
nature,  one  must  still  wonder  at  the  stupidity  which 
calls  an  artist  moral  names  simply  for  giving  life  as 
he  sees  it.  To  blame  the  artist,  not  as  he  should  be 
blamed,  for  failing  in  his  art  of  presenting  life,  but 
for  presenting  a  view  of  life  that  does  not  edify  — 
that  is  the  essence  of  British  philistinism.  I  do  not, 
for  my  part,  hold  that  edification  is  not  worth  dis- 
cussing. I  do  not  hold  that  Mr.  James's  values 
should  not  be  transvalued.  But  that  is  not  the  first 
business  of  literary  criticism.  The  first  business,  in 
this  case,  is  to  ask  whether  Mr.  James  does  really 
possess  a  view  of  life.  Arid  that  he  does  possess 
such  a  view,  of  the  most  charming  if  feline  integrity 
(and,  after  all,  a  cat  has  his  own  difficult  kind  of  in- 
tegrity), is  the  point  one,  in  this  particularly  rude 
and  personal  way,  would  emphasize. 

We  are  so  used,  in  our  fiction,  to  having  the  nove- 
list assert  that  conduct  is  three-fourths  of  life  that 
we  are  scarcely  prepared  for  Mr.  James's  unashamed 
following  of  predilection.  Mr.  James's  themes  may 
not  be  of  first-rate  importance  to  many  people,  but 
they  are,  all  of  them,  in  their  modest  way,  of  impor- 
tance to  Mr.  James.  He  has  shown  in  his  prefaces 
how  many  of  these  themes  came  to  him,  in  his  casual 
existence  as  a  man  of  his  quite  sufficient  world. 
Without  going  outside  that  world,  clinging  to  its 
coziness,  its  familiarity,  its  practised  and  ever  modu- 

[  77  ] 


lated  habit  of  intercourse,  he  yet  found  in  it  a  full 
employment,  and  in  order  to  know  "  life  "  never  re- 
garded it  necessary  to  obey  Mrs.  Gertrude  Ather- 
ton's  injunction  and  spend  years  in  a  newspaper  of- 
fice, living  "  instead  of  dreaming  and  scribbling." 
Mr.  James  has  dreamed  and  scribbled  to  suit  his  own 
admirable  fancy.  According  to  Mrs.  Atherton  he 
would  be  much  improved  had  a  ruthless  city  editor 
"  pruned  "  his  style  into  one  "  direct,  incisive  and 
compelling."  But  there  again  is  the  preconception 
of  what  style  should  be,  and  what  the  man  should  be. 

Anglo-Saxons  are  given  to  presuming  that  if  a  man 
does  exactly  what  he  wants  to  do,  it  is  wrong.  The 
presumption  has  a  great  deal  in  it.  But  when  it 
comes  to  judging  fiction,  it  is  much  safer  to  presume 
that  the  real  artist  knows  what  he  is  about;  that  there 
is  method  in  his  madness;  that  in  fact  the  only  way 
to  judge  him  is  to  stand  in  his  shoes.  This  of  course 
applies  only  to  a  person  who  is  true  to  himself,  who 
knows  what  he  is  about.  It  does  not  apply  for  one 
second  to  people  who  want  style  to  be  dictated  by  the 
ruthless  city  editor.  Such  people  do  not  yet  know 
what  they  exist  for.  They  still  imagine  that  style 
is  something  not  to  be  elicited  but  to  be  prescribed. 

The  great  trouble  with  Henry  James,  of  course,  is 
that  he  takes  the  time  to  indulge  in  his  own  fantasy. 
Men  of  the  practical  world  have  not  time  for  such 
savoring  of  sensation,  such  apparently  unremunera- 
tive  living.  Take  for  instance  the  aforesaid  ruthless 
city  editor.  How  can  the  city  editor  consult  his  own 
fancies,  obey  his  own  impulses,  when  he  has  to  occupy 
himself  with  dishing  up  news  seven  times  a  day? 
The  city  editor  is  not  a  student  of  life,  or  an  expert 
as  to  life.  He  is  too  busy  to  do  anything  except 

[  78  ] 


work  frantically  at  his  job.  If  he  knows  what  he 
likes  or  dislikes,  if  he  is  conscious  of  personal  sen- 
sations, it  is  impossible  for  him  to  savor  them.  The 
vastly  important  thing  is  to  dish  up  seven  editions  a 
day,  or  2,100  a  year,  or  21,000  every  ten  years,  as  his 
contribution  to  that  impressive  and  for  the  most  part 
appalling  spectacle,  the  Day's  Work. 

What  is  true  for  the  city  editor  is  true  for  in- 
numerable business  men,  busy-ness  being  their  busi- 
ness. Such  men  have  no  time  for  Mr.  James's 
meticulous  consultation  of  personal  taste.  In  per- 
emptory phrases  they  dismiss  all  the  things  that  it  in- 
terests Mr.  James  to  put  into  long-hand,  and  they 
find  their  real  life  in  making  two  coathangers  hang 
where  one  hung  before,  in  having  two  neckties  worn 
out  where  one  was  worn  out  before.  To  judge  be- 
tween them  is  like  judging  between  cat  and  dog. 
Personally,  I  like  commonplaces.  I  prefer  the  artist 
who  sees  that  common  life,  and  common  people,  and 
common  affections  are  just  as  precious  in  their  possi- 
bilities as  the  life  of  the  virtuoso,  sophisticated,  cal- 
culating and  discreet.  But  while  the  very  best  dog 
may  be  preferable  to  the  very  best  cat,  I  do  not  think 
of  preferring  the  ordinary  yapping  and  yowling  cur, 
the  demos  dog,  to  this  rare  and  always  amusing  speci- 
men in  Mr.  James. 

In  the  present  volume  Mr.  James's  essential  pre- 
occupation in  the  aesthetics  of  private  relations  is 
proved  by  his  choice  of  persons.  The  standpoint  is 
that  of  a  writer  in  The  Velvet  Glove.  It  is  that  of 
a  middle-aged  painter  in  Nora  Montravers.  In  A 
Round  of  Visits  it  is  that  of  a  middle-aged  Ameri- 
can, with  a  private  though  an  imperiled  income,  and 
of  a  not  dissimilar  person  in  Crapy  Cornelia.  I  dp 

[  79  ] 


not  know  whose  shoes  Mr.  James  wears  in  The 
Bench  of  Desolation.  I  did  not,  and  certainly  not 
perfunctorily,  read  the  The  Bench  of  Desolation. 

To  overpraise  The  Velvet  Glove  is  as  difficult  as 
to  suggest  the  social  manner  of  a  fascinating  foreign 
stranger.  But  the  anecdote  is  simple.  In  a 
crowded  Paris  salon,  John  Berridge,  a  prepossessing 
and  most  esteemed  young  author,  is  complimented 
by  a  dazzling  young  English  Lord  who,  warmly  and 
shyly,  asks  Berridge  for  his  verdict  on  the  book  of  a 
Friend.  Presently  the  friend  appears,  a  radiant 
lomplement  of  the  Lord,  who  instantly  singles  out 
Berridge  and  envelopes  him  in  attention.  Berridge 
is  breathless  in  the  lady's  sudden  and  sunny  wave, 
and  is  gasping  at  the  bountiful  rollers  he  sees  coming. 
The  book  he  glances  at,  a  fearful  composition  written, 
by  the  young  Olympian  in  a  "  lit'ry  "  aberration,  but 
while  he  waits  in  the  corner  of  the  salon,  never  com- 
pletely lost  to  her  sight,  he  is  suddenly  flooded  by  her 
return,  and  borne  happily  but  dumbly  to  the  privacy 
of  her  motor,  her  escort  "  home."  And,  then,  in 
the  motor,  it  is  broken  to  him !  She  wants  an  Ameri- 
can preface  to  her  velvet  novel,  The  Velvet  Glove. 
She  is  seducing  him,  who  already  was  leaping  Olym- 
pus, and  imagining  himself  deified,  the  occupant  of 
her  young  Lord's  throne,  and  by  ravishment.  In 
her  beaming  disclosure  the  young  goddess  "  dear 
man's  "  him,  puts  him  back  on  his  native  earth,  dis- 
mantles him  of  everything  but  self-possession. 
Berridge  refuses  to  capitulate,  refuses  to  give  up  his 
dream  of  her  golden  favor  to  the  invading  banality. 
She,  in  the  last  persuasiveness,  kisses  the  Master's 
hand,  the  hand  that  is  going  to  write  her  Preface. 
Not  a  little  alarmed  at  possible  prostrations,  he 

[  80  J 


firmly  transfers  the  same  kiss  back  to  her  glove,  and 
prepares  to  eliminate  himself  from  the  motor.  But 
home  is  reached  in  a  trice,  in  the  language  of  The 
Velvet  Glove,  and  on  the  step  Berridge's  effusion  of 
the  salon  is  in  one  swift  twist  justified,  the  coronal 
act  is  accomplished.  It  is  in  the  invention  at  the 
end  that  Mr.  James  is  so  cunning. 

The  elaboration  of  Nora  Montravers  is  the  only 
thing  in  its  disfavor.  Mr.  James  extracts  a  good 
deal  of  humor  out  of  the  transference  of  the 
"  cocky  "  family  position  from  a  likable  man  to  his 
too  straw-colored  wife,  a  lady  in  a  "  white  in- 
validical  shawl." 

Out  of  Mr.  James's  two  New  York  stories  it  is 
possible  to  have  a  thoroughly  good  time.  One  of 
them  ends  with  a  suicide.  But  there  is  an  absence  of 
common  emotion,  of  that  quite  undiscriminating 
welling  of  human  sympathy,  in  Mr.  James's  de- 
scription of  violent  death,  which  makes  his  climax 
spill  red  ink  rather  than  blood.  Here  he  does  ac- 
tually fail.  He  is,  worse  luck,  not  "  direct,  incisive, 
compelling  "  enough.  Still  meticulous  when  required 
to  advance  relations  energetically,  he  pitches  with  all 
his  forces,  but  the  ball  has  a  feminine  feebleness. 
Mr.  James  is  not  fitted  for  this  violence.  He  is  too 
urban,  too  urbane.  He  reminds  one  too  much  of  a 
passive,  dignified,  rather  portly  Oriental,  called  upon 
to  sprint  after  a  street  car.  We  turn  our  backs  and 
wait  for  the  incident  to  close. 

In  speaking  of  his  little  man  in  Wimbledon,  Mr. 
James  refers  to  his  imagination.  "  Didn't  it  let 
him  into  more  deep  holes  than  it  pulled  him  out  of? 
Didn't  it  make  for  him  more  tight  places  than  it  saw 
him  through?  Or  didn't  it  at  the  same  time,  not 

[81  ] 


less,  give  him  all  to  himself  a  life,  exquisite,  occult, 
dangerous  and  sacred,  to  which  everything  minis- 
tered, and  which  nothing  could  take  away?  "  Was 
not  Mr.  James  thinking  of  his  own  imagination  when 
he  said  this,  his  "  exquisite,  occult,  dangerous  and 
sacred"  faculty?  Only  the  life  it  gives  him  is  not 
kept  all  to  himself,  but  beautifully  shared  with  us  — 
with  those  of  us  who,  for  want  of  an  equally  ex- 
quisite and  occult  faculty,  repay  our  master  by  call- 
ing him  a  cat  I 

December  2,  IQIO. 


I  **  1 


THE  WAY  OF  ALL  FLESH 

1  HERE  are  two  Samuel  Butlers  in  English  letters. 
One  of  them  died  220  years  ago,  and  he  gets  several 
sticks  of  type  in  our  encyclopedia.  Of  the  other, 
who  died  in  1902,  there  is  no  mention  at  all.  You 
can  ascribe  this  lapse  in  the  encyclopedia  to  the  ig- 
norance of  the  editors,  Messrs.  Gilman,  Peck  and 
Colby.  But  the  encyclopedia  comes  very  near  being 
a  consensus  of  popular  knowledge.  If  its  makers 
had  never  harkened  to  the  more  recent  Samuel  But- 
ler, it  is  ample  indication  that  he  is  still  in  the  ante- 
chamber of  fame. 

How  long  Samuel  Butler  must  stay  in  the  waiting- 
room  when  Mr.  Peck  has  put  Mr.  Colby  in  the  en- 
cyclopedia, and  Mr.  Colby  has  put  Mr.  Peck  there, 
is  an  interesting  question.  Perhaps  the  answer  may 
be  given  that  already  men  are  hammering  on  the 
door  and  demanding  that  Butler  be  admitted.  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw  has  delivered  peremptory  summons, 
and  many  readers  have  already  been  sent  to  Butler 
by  Shaw's  fine  declaration  that  he  owes  much  him- 
self to  that  writer's  "  extraordinarily  fresh,  free  and 
future-piercing  suggestions."  But  Shaw  is  not  alone 
in  proclaiming  Butler.  Two  years  ago  a  British 
weekly  ventured  to  assert  that  "  all  in  all,  he  is,  per- 
haps, the  keenest,  broadest  and  most  fearless  mind  of 
our  age."  This  effusive  verdict  would  have  made 
Butler  smile.  It  is  likely  he  would  himself  have  pre- 
ferred that  other  encomium  by  an  English  paper 

The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  by  Samuel  Butler.     Button,  New  York. 
[  83   ] 


which  he  often  ridiculed.  "  It  may  be  felt  that 
truth  had  best  assert  itself  in  other  ways  than  by 
revolt,"  said  the  London  Times  in  October,  1908, 
"  But  whatever  may  be  thought  of  the  moral,  But- 
ler's steel-pointed  wit  remains  a  pure  delight.  The 
most  stimulating  quality  a  book  can  possess  is  the 
sense  that  behind  it  there  is  a  critical  intelligence 
which  is  always  on  the  watch,  piercing  through  and 
through  its  material,  never  taking  things  for  granted, 
never  allowing  itself  to  be  drugged  by  picturesque 
phrases  or  unreal  sentiment.  There  are  not  so  many 
such  that  Samuel  Butler's  high  integrity,  his  hatred 
of  insincerity  and  mystification,  his  fearlessness,  his 
splendid  power  of  satire,  can  be  overlooked  or  lightly 
valued." 

Eulogies  like  this  are  apt  to  scare  off  the  honest 
American  publisher.  He  knows  that  when  a  man 
is  praised  for  high  integrity,  hatred  of  insincerity 
and  sentimentalism,  and  satirical  power,  the  chances 
of  selling  5000  copies  of  his  masterpiece  are  pretty 
slim.  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  Butler's  sole  novel, 
was  finished  in  1884,  but  it  did  not  appear  till  1903. 
For  seven  years,  then,  the  shrewd  American  pub- 
lishers have  approached  Butler  in  the  way  Mere- 
dith's young  person  approached  the  gay  lady  — 
sniffing  but  not  daring  to  snap.  But  the  temptation 
of  so  much  integrity,  fearlessness,  humor  and  genius 
has  at  last  proved  too  much  for  E.  P.  Button  and 
Co.  They  have  given  Butler's  masterpiece  an 
American  imprint,  and  even  if  they  huddled  his  work 
into  type  that  might  be  called  the  Oculist's  Friend, 
they  deserve  well  of  the  small  literary  clique  in 
America  on  whom  sporting  publishers  are  occasion- 
ally willing  to  venture  a  stake  correspondingly  small. 

[  84] 


Had  we  the  sesame  to  the  door  of  fame,  we  should 
at  once  lay  a  long  red  line  of  what  is  known  as  strip 
carpet  and  invite  Samuel  Butler  to  pick  his  steps  up 
to  the  beckoning  entrance.  But  so  often  do  critics 
use  their  sesame  only  to  find  their  heroes  snubbed 
and  pooh-poohed  and  yawned  over,  that  we  shall  be 
careful  about  recommending  Samuel  Butler  at  large. 
He  pokes  some  fun  himself  at  Impulsia  Gushington, 
or  whoever  it  is  that  reviews  novels  in  our  contem- 
poraries under  the  legend:  "There  is  no  Evil." 
And  certainly  there  is  edge  to  his  criticism  of  the 
weekly  that  once  a  month  or  so  "  always  found  some 
picture  which  was  the  finest  that  had  been  done  since 
the  old  masters,  or  some  satire  that  was  the  finest 
that  had  appeared  since  Swift  or  some  something 
which  was  incomparably  the  finest  that  had  appeared 
since  something  else."  Yet  it  would  be  unfair  to 
adopt  his  own  cool  words  and  say  of  this  book  that 
it  was  merely  "  an  able  one  and  abounded  with 
humor,  ju'Jt  satire,  and  good  sense."  That  much  is 
said  every  week  of  books  as  full  of  waste  as  Winston 
Churchill's.  To  convey  the  extraordinary  character 
of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  one  must  do  more  even 
than  rally  authorities  like  Shaw,  and  the  Nation  and 
the  Times.  One  must  assert  one's  own  humble 
satisfaction  and  in  no  unmistakable  terms. 

Any  one  who  has  got  this  far  in  the  present  review 
is  more  than  likely  to  understand  that  in  Samuel 
Butler  there  is  little  of  the  conventional  rococo  which 
endears  Winston  Churchill,  poor  man,  to  his  enor- 
mous and  quite  uncritical  audience.  But  the  aston- 
ishing and  delightful  thing  about  Samuel  Butler  is 
that  he  does  not  write  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  to  sat- 
isfy the  lovers  of  pure  and  plain  principle  and  clap 

[  85  ] 


them  on  the  back.  He  does  not  seek  to  justify  the 
select  few  to  their  estimable  selves,  at  the  expense 
of  the  purveyors  of  conventional  fodder.  No,  in- 
deed. Samuel  Butler's  sword  is  not  only  Castilian 
but  double-edged.  With  one  edge  he  undoubtedly 
attacks  the  uncritical,  but  with  the  other,  and  the 
keener,  he  cuts  into  the  supercilious  prig.  It  would 
be  a  mistake  to  say  that  his  novel  shows  indifference 
to  idealism.  It  is  limited  in  its  appeal  precisely  be- 
cause it  can  interest  only  those  who  have  endured  in- 
trospection and  the  tortures  of  conscience  and  the 
agonies  of  self-criticism.  But  the  small  company 
that  has  an  intellectual  sense  (usually  a  proud  intel- 
lectual sense)  of  affinity  with  Hamlet  need  not  sup- 
pose that  Samuel  Butler  is  going  to  do  for  them  what 
the  Russian  novelists  have  done.  On  the  contrary, 
the  whole  burden  of  his  novel  is  the  follies  of  Ham- 
letry.  If  his  book  is  merciless  to  the  ordinary  re- 
ligious father  and  mother  in  England,  it  is  equally 
relentless  toward  their  mollycoddle  son.  But  there 
is  this  difference:  Samuel  Butler  understands  the 
mollycoddle  to  the  core  and  loves  him :  and  he  ex- 
hibits his  evolution  because  he  knows  that  the  follies 
which  he  detects  could  not  exist  except  in  a  soul  that 
is  to  be  valued. 

Ernest  Pontifex,  Samuel  Butler's  hero,  suffers  hor- 
ribly from  idealism.  When  at  last  he  begins  to  see 
the  idiocy  of  trying  to  be  absolutely  perfect,  it  is 
only  to  discover  that  the  huge  majority  of  the  men 
have  never  been  troubled  by  any  such  idiocy,  but  have 
quite  naturally  adopted  the  Eleventh  Command- 
ment, "  Thou  Shalt  Not  Be  Found  Out."  It  stands 
to  reason  that  those  who  have  never  worried  mor- 
bidly about  their  imperfection  will  take  a  thoroughly 

[  86  ] 


Rooseveltian  attitude  toward  Ernest,  call  him  a 
mollycoddle,  and  have  done  with  it.  The  curious 
thing  is  that  Butler  himself  seems  to  agree  with 
Roosevelt.  He  singles  out  one  Towneley  as  the 
graceful,  lovable,  well  bred,  "  red-blooded  "  type  — . 
an  empiric  man  who  would  generally  echo  John 
Mitchel's  dictum  that  a  certain  nation  of  molly- 
coddles "  would  have  been  saved  long  ago  if  it  wasn't 
for  their  damned  souls."  Ernest  Pontifex  adores 
Towneley  and  he  sums  up  the  difference  between  that 
eupeptic  gentleman  and  his  confused  self  in  these 
words :  "  I  see  it  all  now.  The  people  like  Towne- 
ley are  the  only  ones  who  know  anything  that  is 
worth  knowing,  and  like  that  of  course  I  can  never 
be.  But  to  make  Towneleys  possible  there  must  be 
hewers  of  wood  and  drawers  of  water  —  men,  in 
fact,  through  whom  conscious  knowledge  must  pass 
before  it  can  reach  those  who  can  apply  it  gracefully 
and  instinctively  as  the  Towneleys  can.  I  am  a 
hewer  of  wood,  but  if  I  accept  the  position  frankly 
and  do  not  set  up  to  be  a  Towneley,  it  does  not  mat- 
ter." 

This  attitude  of  Butler's  is  summed  up  in  the 
phrase,  "  The  result  depends  upon  the  thing  done 
and  the  motive  goes  for  nothing."  But  there  is  a 
difference,  after  all,  between  this  scorn  for  fine-spun 
and  high-flown  theories  that  don't  work  out  in  prac- 
tice and  the  ordinary  scorn  of  the  rationalist.  Ulti- 
mately Butler  is  not  a  red-blood.  Ultimately  he  has 
"  confidence  that  it  is  righter  and  better  to  believe 
what  is  true  than  what  is  untrue,  even  though  belief 
in  the  untruth  may  seem  at  first  most  expedient." 
But  he  is  sick  of  the  writers  who  do  nothing  except 
prate  about  idealism.  He  is  sick  of  the  idealistic 

[87] 


pimple  that  is  priggishness.  He  is  sick  of  the  peo- 
ple, unconventional  or  conventional,  whose  ideals 
are  heard  but  not  seen. 

The  hatred  of  rules  is  no  small  part  of  Samuel 
Butler's  nature,  especially  the  rules  of  parents  and 
schoolmasters.  The  only  rules  he  regards  as  worth 
knowing  are  not  the  fixed  rules  of  institutions,  but 
the  rules  of  thumb  by  which  human  beings  are  living. 
Over  and  over  again  he  parallels  that  philosophy 
which  says  that  an  actress  who  remains  chaste  is  a 
prig.  "  Extremes  are  alone  logical,  and  they  are 
always  absurd,  the  mean  is  alone  practicable  and  it 
is  always  illogical.  .  .  .  Sensible  people  will  get 
through  life  by  rule  of  thumb  as  they  may  interpret 
it  most  conveniently  without  asking  too  many  ques- 
tions for  consciences's  sake."  This  lesson,  of  course, 
would  be  wasted  on  the  Average  Man,  who  is  sel- 
dom even  aware  of  his  illogicality.  It  would  be 
wasted  on  the  ordinary  American,  who  would  be 
bored  even  at  hearing  it  discussed.  But  it  will  not 
be  wasted  on  those  who,  like  Samuel  Butler  himself, 
want  primarily  to  live  a  life  as  honest  as  is  compati- 
ble with  happiness,  and  who  are  feeling  like  Judge 
Grosscup,  the  deplorable  "  need  for  honesty "  in 
others.  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  is,  in  the  clever 
phrase  of  H.  G.  Wells,  a  Dreadnaught.  It  is  of 
about  the  same  length  as  Tono-Bungay  and  little 
shorter  than  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  or  It  Never  Can 
Happen  Again.  To  my  mind  it  is  a  wiser  book  than 
any  of  these,  which  is  saying  a  good  deal.  It  has 
less  brilliance  than  Tono-Bungay  and  less  suggestive- 
ness.  It  has  less  background  and  less  social  idiom 
than  Bennett's  great  book.  It  is  less  whimsical  and 
less  ingratiating  than  De  Morgan's.  But  it  knows 

[88] 


more  about  the  old  Adam  than  any  of  the  three,  and 
can  give  them  fifty  yards  in  a  hundred  for  critical 
intelligence.  Occasionally  in  novels  you  read  of  a 
Great  Writer  whose  work  is  so  stupendous  that  the 
novelist  doesn't  dare  to  quote  from  it  (unless  he  be 
as  foolhardy  as  May  Sinclair).  Well,  Samuel  But- 
ler would  be  an  ideal  figure  for  that  Great  Writer. 
In  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  there  is  not  (me  judice) 
one  meretricious  line.  The  same  might  be  said  of 
The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  but  the  difference  between  a 
successful  novel  of  ideas  and  successful  novel  of  man- 
ners is  like  the  difference  between  exploding  dyna- 
mite and  discharging  a  rifle. 

Butler  admits  you  into  an  easy  and  humorous  free- 
masonry, if  you  happen  to  be  his  sort.  Not  with  a 
wink,  but  quietly  and  serenely.  He  tells  you  what 
you've  always  privately  known,  but  never  admitted, 
and  he  also  clears  up  many  things  you  thought  yo" 
knew,  but  didn't.  He  is  not  above  a  certain  perver- 
sity about  the  idealist,  but  he  makes  no  easy  jokes 
and  works  off  nobody  else's  wisdom  or  sentiment. 
What  he  has  is  his  own,  and  it  is  very  astonishing 
and  shrewd  of  its  kind. 

People  who  were  born  sensible  may  not  enjoy  this 
book.  For  them  I  cannot  venture  to  speak.  But 
for  those  who  have  worked  hard  for  whatever  un- 
derstanding they  have  got,  God  help  them,  the  book 
will  be  intimate,  diverting  and  reassuring.  It  will 
not  excite  people  who  know  how  to  be  happy.  But 
there  are  many  people  who  don't  know  whether  they 
are  as  happy  as  they  might  expect,  and  there  are 
others  who,  having  failed  to  be  happy  by  doing  what 
they  were  told,  have  at  last  caught  on  to  the  fact  that 
very  few  people  are  doing  as  they  were  told,  the  most 

[  89  ] 


successful  perhaps  least  of  all.  For  such  people,  in 
whom  there  has  been  less  sense  than  sensibility,  the 
plot  of  the  novel  will  be  no  less  exciting  than  plots 
far  easier  advertised.  For,  while  Butler  only  draws 
full-length  portraits  of  his  hero  up  to  the  infant  age 
of  28,  he  sees  him  through  the  most  serious  and 
threatening  vicissitudes,  and  though  the  youth  "  gets 
religion  "  when  he  is  still  in  Cambridge  and  loses  it 
in  London,  he  has  to  go  clean  through  bankruptcy, 
imprisonment  and  matrimony  before  he  learns  the 
first  things  about  himself  or  human  nature. 

The  plot  is  so  alluring  throughout  that  one  might 
easily  wonder  how  Butler  manages  to  get  in  so  much 
sheer  comment.  It  is  done,  for  the  most  part,  by 
interluded  essays  —  digressions  of  a  page  or  less. 
Thus  one  may  find  Advice  to  Parents,  Hints  on  Hap- 
piness, essays  on  Genius,  on  Clergymen's  Sons,  on 
Sex  Education,  on  Luck,  on  Literary  Instinct,  on 
Speculation  and  the  Stock  Market,  on  Ideas,  on 
Spiritual  Wild  Oats,  on  Truth,  on  Loss  of  Money  as 
the  greatest  of  all  mishaps,  on  False  Idealism,  on 
Useless  Metaphysics,  on  the  Art  of  Mental  Healing, 
on  Good  Intentions,  and  on  Book  Reviewers.  Such 
passages  are  improved  by  observations  like  these: 
'  The  advantage  of  doing  one's  praising  for  oneself 
is  that  one  can  lay  it  on  so  thick  and  exactly  in  the 
right  places."  "  The  best  liar  is  he  who  makes  the 
smallest  amount  of  lying  go  the  longest  way." 

Clever  males  are  best  judged  in  their  attitude  to- 
ward women.  I  should  prefer  to  leave  Samuel  But- 
ler not  dwelling  on  his  extraordinary  exposition  of 
the  cruelty  in  childhood  that  comes  through  the  ig- 
norance and  stupidity  of  parents,  nor  on  his  serene 
examination  of  the  things  that  can  happen  to  one 

[  90] 


who  is  "  Quixotic,  impulsive,  altruistic,  guileless." 
Here  he  is  rare,  but  the  best  people  in  his  book  are 
Mrs.  Jupp  and  Althea.  Miss  Althea  Pontifex,  an 
aunt  not  yet  fifty  when  she  dies,  never  gave  her 
nephew  a  syllable  of  good  advice,  but  she  cared 
enough  for  him  to  leave  him  her  fortune  in  trust  till 
he  was  28.  "  It  is  an  unusually  foolish  will,"  she 
said.  "  but  he  is  an  unusually  foolish  boy."  And 
perhaps  the  "  last  coherent  words  "  she  uttered  to 
her  faithful  friend  who  tells  this  story  of  her  nephew 
in  the  first  person  are  fullest  of  the  peculiar  and 
precious  flavor  that  was  their  author's.  Let  those 
who  enjoy  these  words  know  that  they  do  not  belie 
the  book:  "She  talked  principally  about  her 
nephew.  '  Don't  scold  him,'  she  said,  '  if  he  is  vola- 
tile and  continually  takes  things  up  only  to  throw 
them  down  again.  How  can  he  find  out  his  strength 
or  weakness  otherwise?  A  man's  profession,'  she 
said  —  and  here  she  gave  one  of  her  wicked  little 
laughs  — '  is  not  like  his  wife,  which  he  must  take 
once  for  all,  for  better,  for  worse,  without  proof 
beforehand.  .  .  . 

"  '  Above  all,'  she  continued,  '  do  not  let  him  work 
up  to  his  full  strength,  except  once  or  twice  in  his 
life  time;  nothing  is  well  done  nor  worth  doing  un- 
less, take  it  all  around,  it  has  come  pretty  easily. 
Theobald  and  Christina  (his  parents)  would  give 
him  a  pinch  of  salt  and  tell  him  to  put  it  on  the  tail 
of  the  seven  deadly  virtues  ' ;  —  here  she  laughed 
again  in  her  old  manner  at  once  so  mocking  and  so 
sweet — 'I  think  if  he  likes  pancakes  he  had  per- 
haps better  eat  them  on  Shrove  Tuesday,  but  this  is 
enough.' ' 

June  10,  70/0. 


BUTLER'S  NOTE-BOOKS 

IN  The  Doctor's  Dilemma  there  is  a  saucy  refer- 
ence to  an  unprofessional  heretic  who  has  views  on 
art,  science,  morals  and  religion.  Old  Sir  Patrick 
Cullen  shocks  the  heretic's  disciple  by  not  even  recog- 
nizing the  name.  "  Bernard  Shaw?"  he  ponders, 
"  I  never  heard  of  him.  He's  a  Methodist  preacher, 
I  suppose."  Louis  is  horrified.  "  No,  no.  He's 
the  most  advanced  man  now  living:  he  isn't  any- 
thing." The  old  doctor  is  not  set  back  an  inch. 
These  "  advanced  "  men  who  impress  the  young  by 
employing  the  accumulations  of  genius  —  he  knows 
them.  "  I  assure  you,  young  man,"  he  informs 
Louis,  "  my  father  learnt  the  doctrine  of  deliverance 
from  sin  from  John  Wesley's  own  lips  before  you 
or  Mr.  Shaw  were  born." 

It  is  a  pleasant  thing  to  claim  that  the  man  you 
admire  is  "  advanced  "  and  to  believe  serenely  that 
you  are  progressive  along  with  him.  It  is  also  a 
convenient  thing  to  employ  such  question-begging 
phrases  as  heterodox,  radical,  free-thinker,  anarchist. 
The  trouble  with  such  phrases,  indicative  and  ex- 
citing as  they  are,  is  their  plain  relativity  to  some- 
thing reprehensible  that  only  you  yourself  have  in 
mind.  The  world  is  full  of  moss-grown  places 
called  Newtown  and  Newburg  and  Nykobing  and 
Neuville.  It  is  also  full  of  moss-grown  writers  who 
once  were  advanced  and  revolutionary.  If  a  writer 
is  to  be  paraded  as  heterodox  it  has  to  be  shown 

The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler.    Button,  New  York. 
[  92  ] 


that  he  does  something  more  than  take  up  an  agree- 
able position.  It  has  to  be  shown  that  he  has  a 
manner,  a  method,  of  dealing  with  things  that  really 
deserve  to  be  considered  advanced. 

This  is  Samuel  Butler's  claim  on  posterity.  The 
urgently  intelligent  son  of  a  dull  English  clergyman, 
he  certainly  did  not  lack  incentives  to  heterodoxy. 
Besides  that  he  was  born  in  1835  and  was  one  of  the 
first  of  Darwin's  admirers,  as  later  he  was  one  of 
the  first  of  his  critics.  But  there  was  more  than 
reflex  action  in  Samuel  Butler's  heterodoxy.  He 
was  never  anything  so  regular  as  an  anarchist.  He 
distrusted  authority  in  religion  and  art  and  science 
without  discarding  religious,  artistic  or  scientific 
values.  He  thought  freely  without  being  a  free- 
thinker, and  radically  without  being  a  radical.  To 
say  he  was  lawless  would  entirely  misrepresent  him, 
he  was  not  nearly  so  much  a  revolutionary  as  a 
conscientious  objector  on  the  loose.  Here  again  he 
fell  into  none  of  the  ordinary  classifications.  He 
was  not  a  missionary.  He  had  as  little  ambition  to 
form  a  new  orthodoxy  as  to  attach  himself  to  an  old 
one.  He  had  a  marked  propensity,  that  of  thinking 
for  himself  —  one  of  those  perplexing  propensities 
that  nothing  seems  to  determine,  that  may  occur  in 
an  emperor  or  his  slave  and  no  one  know  how  or 
why.  And  that  propensity,  the  capital  distinction 
of  his  many-sided  life,  gave  him  emancipation  in  a 
way  that  no  one  could  have  predicted  and  that  was 
long  quite  difficult  to  label. 

It  was  difficult  to  label  mainly  because  Samuel  But- 
ler's intellectual  adventure  had  come  to  an  end  before 
the  label  was  invented.  Samuel  Butler  was  above 
everything  a  pragmatist,  one  of  those  forerunners 

[  93  ] 


of  pragmatism  who  did  not  become  conscious  of  its 
"  universal  mission  "  or  its  "  conquering  destiny," 
who  nevertheless  employed  the  method  intuitively 
and  u  made  momentous  contributions  to  truth  by  its 
means."  It  is  tragic,  in  many  ways,  that  Butler  had 
not  the  benefit  of  the  formulation  of  pragmatism. 
Had  he  possessed  it,  however,  he  could  not  have 
been  more  closely,  more  consistently,  its  exponent. 
"  Pragmatism,"  said  William  James  in  1907,  "  rep- 
resents a  perfectly  familiar  attitude  in  philosophy, 
the  empiricist  attitude,  but  it  represents  it,  as  it  seems 
to  me,  both  in  a  more  radical  and  in  a  less  objection- 
able form  than  it  has  ever  yet  assumed.  A  prag- 
matist  turns  his  back  resolutely  and  once  for  all  upon 
a  lot  of  inveterate  habits  dear  to  professional  philos- 
ophers. He  turns  away  from  abstraction  and  in- 
sufficiency, from  verbal  solutions,  from  bad  a  priori 
reasons,  from  fixed  principles,  closed  systems,  and 
pretended  absolutes  and  origins.  He  turns  towards 
concreteness  and  adequacy,  towards  facts,  towards 
action  and  towards  power.  That  means  the  em- 
piricist temper  regnant  and  the  rationalist  temper 
sincerely  given  up.  It  means  the  open  air  and  pos- 
sibilities of  nature,  as  against  dogma,  artificiality, 
and  the  pretense  of  the  finality  of  truth."  This 
was  the  attitude  Samuel  Butler  achieved  for  himself 
and  the  one  which  these  Note-Books  so  fully  and 
singularly  exemplify. 

There  is  a  kind  of  man  whose  sensations  come  at 
the  double,  who  must  take  them  down  as  they  fly  by 
or  lose  them  eternally.  Butler's  Note-Books  were 
not  kept  for  such  a  purpose.  It  was  not  his  senses 
that  were  imperious  for  a  scribe:  it  was  his  rumina- 
tions, his  ideas.  He  was  painter  and  musician  as 

[  94] 


well  as  writer,  and  he  was  writer  in  the  most  general 
interpretation,  but  his  chief  characteristic  was  not, 
so  to  speak,  sensuous  impressionability.  It  was  an 
incessant  intellectual  activity.  He  had  "  the  prin- 
ciple of  stopping  everywhere  and  anywhere  to  put 
down  his  notes,  as  the  true  painter  will  stop  any- 
where and  everywhere  to  sketch,"  but  the  notes  were 
not  wild  or  woodland,  they  were  memoranda  in  his 
endless  discovery  of  wisdom.  Occasionally  the  spec- 
tacle of  the  world  urged  him  to  record  emotion,  and 
he  observes  that  from  the  age  of  twelve  the  music 
of  his  well-beloved  Handel  was  never  a  day  out  of 
his  head.  But  it  was  the  opinions  and  ideas  he 
derived  from  experience  that  stirred  him  to  write  in 
his  Note-Books.  Experience  did  not  so  much 
enamor  him  as  stimulate  his  mind. 

The  vivacity  of  Samuel  Butler's  mind  is  astonish- 
ing. He  was  not  brilliant  in  the  sense  that  his  ex- 
pression was  dazzling.  Dazzling  writers  like 
George  Meredith  were  distasteful  to  him,  and  he  felt 
little  of  their  need  to  give  acuity  to  the  words  that 
were  to  convey  poignant  experiences.  Neither  did 
he  wish  to  incite  passion  or  ecstasy.  He  held  every- 
thing, even  his  God,  at  arm's  length,  and  the  light 
by  which  he  examined  his  world  was  daylight.  Be- 
cause of  his  sharp  curiosity,  however,  his  inde- 
pendence and  audacity  and  humorous  skepticism,  he 
achieved  that  kind  of  penetrativeness  which  is  often 
called  brilliant.  Penetrative  he  was  to  an  extraor- 
dinary degree  and  over  an  area  that  few  men  of  his 
time  even  dreamed  of  encompassing.  He  was  dry 
on  occasion  and  on  occasion  captious,  but  he  never 
said  a  heartless  thing  or  a  foolish.  And  from  the 
first  line  he  wrote  to  the  last  there  is  not  a  single 

[95  ] 


dishonest  utterance.  Almost  every  one  who  writes 
is  tempted  now  and  then  to  say  something  which  is 
not  quite  authentic,  to  use  a  hackneyed  phrase  if  not 
a  hackneyed  thought.  Samuel  Butler  authenticated 
everything  he  uttered.  During  his  growing  years 
and  indeed  all  through  his  life  he  found  himself 
brushed  aside  by  the  pundits.  From  pretentious- 
ness he  suffered  as  only  a  modest  man  can  suffer,  and 
he  abhorred  it.  One  result  of  it  was  to  accentuate 
his  own  priestlessness  and  simplicity.  He  could 
easily  have  got  himself  up  as  an  authority.  It  is  a 
thing  that  almost  any  busybody  with  a  plodding  sec- 
retary can  accomplish.  Butler  leaned  over  back- 
wards to  avoid  doing  it.  He  even  went  so  far  as  to 
suspect  everything  that  had  the  air  of  being  profes- 
sional, and  to  take  a  perverse  pleasure  in  offering 
to  machine-made  scholars  his  own  hand-made  hetero- 
dox views.  And  not  only  were  his  views  prag- 
matically decided,  so  were  the  bases  on  which  he 
formed  them.  It  is  significant  that  though  he  was 
born  in  1835  and  lived  to  1902  he  got  more  out  of 
Handel  in  music  and  Bellini  in  painting  than  out  of 
any  other  masters.  Homer  and  Shakespeare  hap- 
pened to  interest  him,  but  he  paid  no  attention  what- 
ever to  those  "  imaginary  obligations  "  of  an  aca- 
demic or  journalistic  order  which  keep  most  people 
from  discovering  what  they  really  value.  Tolstoy 
and  Ibsen,  Morris  and  Karl  Marx,  were  Butler's 
contemporaries.  They  might  as  well  have  lived  in 
Kamchatka  for  any  chance  they  had  of  crossing  the 
threshold  of  his  hospitable  but  resolutely  unfashion- 
able mind. 

Between  the  cravings  of  gregariousness  and  the 
exactions  of  his  critical  intelligence,  then,  Butler  was 

[96] 


never  at  a  loss  to  decide.  But  this  severance  from 
the  crowd  was  not  without  an  emotional  result. 
[There  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  suffered  some  of  the 
penalties  of  being  an  intellectual  anchorite.  From 
the  egoistic  rigidity  that  may  so  easily  be  the  out- 
come of  isolation  —  if  not  its  promoter  —  he  was 
preserved  by  common  sense.  Though  he  embraced 
the  most  difficult  of  experiments,  the  experiment  of 
true  independence,  he  kept  on  the  right  side  of  the 
thin  partition  mainly  through  avoiding  the  mistakes 
of  that  early  ancestor  who  imagined  God  as  solemn 
because  "  he  was  impressed  with  an  undue  sense  of 
his  own  importance,  and,  as  a  natural  consequence, 
he  had  no  sense  of  humor."  In  spite  of  extreme 
common  sense  and  humor,  the  price  of  being  hetero- 
dox told  on  Butler.  He  was  much  too  spirited  to 
lament  his  exile,  but  sometimes  he  was  cross-grained 
and  spiritually  dyspeptic.  His  dislike  of  Beethoven, 
Leonardo  and  Goethe  was  not  mere  buoyant  uncon- 
ventionality  or  admirable  aesthetic  sabotage.  It  had 
a  slightly  diseased  contrariness.  He  was  wonder- 
fully outspoken  about  his  own  neglect  and  compara- 
tive failure,  and  exceedingly  candid  about  his  aspira- 
tions for  fame,  but  all  this  would  not  prevent  his 
being  estranged  from  certain  great  men  by  very 
reason  of  their  general  acceptance.  Those  who  are 
themselves  frustrated  cannot  help  the  impulse  to 
frustrate  others,  and  the  fact  that  his  unaffected 
opinions  were  not  fairly  received  sometimes  gave 
Butler  an  animus  in  challenging  opinions  that  were. 
Unsparing  pragmatism,  however,  kept  him  from 
being  a  crank  and  made  him  a  priceless  critic  of 
what  the  sage  has  called  "  first  and  last  things." 
And  the  freshest  of  his  discriminations,  the  most  un- 

[  97  ] 


expected  and  the  most  unqualified,  are  to  be  found  in 
his  Note-Books.  It  is  a  common  thing  in  life  to 
hear  some  one  bemoaning  a  talker  whose  music  died 
in  him.  Here  is  a  wise  and  humorous  and  varied 
man  who  preserved  his  observations  as  they  sprang 
from  him.  It  is  monologue,  it  is  true,  rather  de- 
liberate and  reasoned  monologue  editorially  cut-and- 
dried.  The  fact  remains  that  it  is  the  essential 
Samuel  Butler  in  his  normal  habit  of  mind.  Under 
compulsion  to  think  for  himself,  his  Note-Books 
detect  him  in  the  process,  and  so  represent  the  range 
and  depth  of  his  genius.  That  it  was  genius,  though 
often  blue  in  the  cold  of  his  era,  there  is  no  ques- 
tioning. And  it  is  peculiarly  precious  because  it  is 
liberating.  It  cannot  but  open  the  doors  for  those 
who  have  felt  orthodoxies  stifle  them  in  their  own 
attempt  to  think  for  themselves. 


[98] 


NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  3 


THE  MODERN: 

TONO-BUNGAY 

LITERALLY  Tono-Bungay  is  not  the  book  of  the 
week,  but  so  astounding  a  novel  must  not  be  sacrificed 
to  the  calendar.  Among  the  novels  of  the  season  it 
is  preeminent,  more  than  that,  it  is  epochal.  By 
epochal  it  is  not  intended  to  imply  that  Mr.  Wells  is 
already  strutting  among  the  ruins  of  the  Athenaeum. 
These  epochs  that  book  reviewers  appoint  are  often 
very  subtle,  very  sedate.  They  conform  to  Profes- 
sor James's  arrangement  that  the  most  violent  revo- 
lutions in  an  individual's  beliefs  leave  most  of  his  old 
order  standing.  But  they  take  place.  And  if  an 
epoch  can  be  marked  by  a  single  novel,  one  is  marked 
by  this  astounding  production. 

Not  to  obtain  the  reader  under  false  pretences,  it 
may  be  intimated  that  Tono-Bungay  teems  with  ideas, 
seethes  with  opinions,  writhes  with  self-conscious- 
ness. Because  it  suggests  the  three-ring  Thack- 
erayan  plot,  and  is  crammed  with  philosophy,  it  has 
been  set  down  as  a  mid- Victorian  effusion.  It  is  no 
more  mid-Victorian  than  the  Flatiron.  To  get  a 
congruous  idea  of  Mr.  Wells  one  must  take  him  for 
what  he  is,  and  not  mutilate  him  by  impossible  com- 
parisons. 

Judging  chiefly  by  the  person  revealed  in  Tono- 
Bungay,  Mr.  Wells  is  conspicuously  and  essentially 

Tono-Bungay,  by  H.  G.  Wells.     Duffield,  New  York. 


not  a  gentleman.  Conspicuously  and  essentially, 
Thackeray,  Henry  James,  George  Meredith  are 
gentlemen.  Their  tradition  is  that  of  good  breed- 
ing, fine  feeling,  the  humanities  and  the  arts.  In 
their  main  effect  they  conform  with  the  aristocratic 
code,  as  it  exists  in  a  freemasonry  of  class.  Mr. 
Wells,  on  the  contrary,  does  not  accept  this  code  or 
belong  to  this  class.  He  has  erupted  into  art  over 
a  drug  counter,  but  not  as  a  conscious  and  swagger- 
ing iconoclast.  He  is  the  new  type,  cultured  poly- 
technically.  He  knows  his  Charles  Lamb  and  his 
Richardson.  He  derives  from  them,  too,  but  he  was 
not  spoon-fed  on  them.  And  what  marks  him  as  dif- 
ferent from  his  gentlemanly  compeers  is  his  dogged 
determination  to  reveal  himself,  whether  his  feeling 
be  fine  feeling  or  coarse,  his  breeding  high  or  low. 

This  self-revelation  would  be  no  great  perform- 
ance if  Mr.  Wells  were  simply  candid.  When  literal 
candor  registers  nothing  but  sharp  egoistic  reaction 
its  application,  as  in  the  case  of  Marie  Bashkirtseff, 
is  exceedingly  narrow.  But  Mr.  Wells,  while  oc- 
cupied intensely  with  his  own  sensations,  reactions 
and  conclusions,  is  immensely  busy  with  his  prehensile 
intelligence.  On  that  intelligence  he  tries  every- 
thing; and  he  is  vastly  superior  to  the  gentleman  in 
so  far  as  he  is  not  confined  to  a  coign  of  social  van- 
tage, but  can  stride  into  those  closed  chambers  of  the 
soul  where  the  terrible  operations  of  life  are  com- 
mitted, but  where  the  gentleman  is  not  serious  artist 
enough  to  enter. 

It  is  not  suggested  that  Mr.  Wells,  in  being  true  to 
nature,  is  selecting  to  be  true  to  the  beast  in  nature. 
Mr.  George  Moore  is  enough  of  an  artist  to  have  no 
gentlemanly  code,  but  he  thinks  that  the  inadequacies 

[  102  ] 


of  the  gentleman  can  be  supplied  by  the  adequacies 
of  the  cad.  For  this  Mr.  Wells  is  too  austere  and 
serious  a  spirit.  It  has  a  silly  enough  sound,  but  let 
me  say  that  he  could  be  a  gentleman  if  he  would. 
He  has,  however,  taken  the  problem  of  Life  on  his 
shoulders,  and  that  problem  he  cannot  solve  with  the 
limited  gentlemanly  code.  It  is  a  pity  that  he  stops 
to  jeer  at  the  ritual  of  a  cult  which,  after  all,  has  its 
virtues.  But  at  least  we  feel  that  Mr.  Wells  has 
broken  out  of  the  English  convention  with  whatever 
wounds  to  himself,  mainly  because  that  convention 
had  ceased  to  be  decent  enough  and  philosophical 
enough  to  hold  him. 

Mr.  Wells  attempts  a  racking  derangement  of  all 
our  standards  when  he  takes  away  this  gentlemanly 
standard,  with  its  established  directions  to  us  upon 
all  questions,  directions  as  to  how  we  should  feel, 
how  we  should  fall  in  love,  how  we  should  aspire, 
how  we  should  believe,  how  we  should  know  our- 
selves and  declare  ourselves.  If  we  are  not  given 
the  cue,  how  can  most  of  us  know  what  we  are  to 
think  1  And  here  is  this  creature,  H.  G.  Wells,  ex- 
hibiting in  Tono-Bungay  a  man  let  loose  in  modern 
life  who  finds  romance  unromantic,  religion  irre- 
ligious and  so  on.  And  this  too,  without  laying  him- 
self open  in  a  single  paragraph  to  the  stock  accusa- 
tions that  if  he  does  not  see  life  as  the  gentleman  sees 
it,  he  must  be  a  cad,  a  sneak,  a  pervert,  a  sensualist, 
etc. 

Tono-Bungay  has  been  acutely  described  as  the 
history  of  the  collision  of  the  soul  of  George  Pon- 
derevo  (narrator  and  nephew  of  the  medicine-man) 
with  his  epoch:  the  arraignment  of  a  whole  epoch 
at  the  bar  of  the  conscience  of  a  man  who  is  intellec- 

[  103  ] 


tually  honest  and  powerfully  intellectual.  But  I  pre- 
fer George's  own  words,  which  leave  out  the  idea 
of  "  arraignment  " :  "I  suppose  what  I'm  really 
trying  to  render  is  nothing  more  nor  less  than  life  — 
as  one  man  has  found  it." 

This  word  Life  intimidates  many  novel  readers, 
who  are  convinced  that  they  get  their  bellyful  of 
experience  during  the  day,  and  want  the  novelist  to 
soothe  them  like  a  masseur.  To  want  to  be  soothed 
shows  a  pleasant  instinct  for  entertainment,  but  I 
submit  that  we  have  no  right  to  lie  down,  inert  and 
devitalized,  and  expect  Mr.  Wells  to  pat  us  and 
to  pet  us.  The  challenge  is  a  plain  one.  Tono- 
Bungay  is  occupied  with  the  quests  of  the  modern 
man,  their  fatuity  as  well  as  their  complexity.  If 
you  really  desire  to  understand  this  modern  man  you 
must,  without  complaining  of  the  deponent,  encoun- 
ter Tono-Bungay. 

There  is  nothing  prurient,  nothing  finikin  about 
Tono-Bungay.  Nor  in  all  its  irresistible  narrative  is 
there  subservience  to  the  conventional.  When 
Henry  James  first  went  to  London,  one  won  an  ex- 
quisite literary  disquisition,  his  imagination  giving 
him  release  from  reality.  But  when  George  Pon- 
derevo  goes  up  to  London  you  get  something  pre- 
ciously commonplace  and  common  sense.  "  Yes, 
that  first  raid  upon  London  under  the  moist  and  chilly 
depression  of  January  had  an  immense  effect  upon 
me.  It  was  for  me  an  epoch-making  disappoint- 
ment. I  had  thought  of  London  as  a  large,  free, 
welcoming,  adventurous  place,  and  I  saw  it  slovenly 
and  harsh  and  irresponsive." 

It  is  these  epoch-making  disappointments,  these 
beams  of  intelligence  through  mists  of  "  art  "  and 

[  104  ] 


sentiment,  that  make  Tono-Bungay  an  epoch-making 
novel.  For,  be  it  noted,  there  is  a  mould  for  all 
these  raids  upon  London,  ready-made  and  artistic. 
But  Mr.  Wells  has  smashed  the  mould  and  patiently, 
heroically,  painfully  cast  his  own.  And  we,  whose 
impressions  had  been  strained  and  dislocated  in  the 
old  moulds,  adapt  ourselves  gratefully  to  this  new 
one.  As  to  the  manner  of  man  whom  Mr.  Wells 
dispatches  to  London : 

London!  I  came  up  to  it,  young  and  without  advisers, 
rather  priggish,  rather  dangerously  open-minded  and  very 
open-eyed,  and  with  something  —  it  is,  I  think,  the  common 
gift  of  imaginative  youth,  and  I  claim  it  unblushingly  — 
fine  in  me,  finer  than  the  world  and  seeking  fine  responses. 
I  did  not  want  simply  to  live  or  simply  to  live  happily  and 
well;  I  wanted  to  serve  and  do  and  make  —  with  some  no- 
bility. It  was  in  me.  It  is  in  half  the  youth  of  the  world. 

"  With  some  nobility."  Very  soon  George,  hav* 
ing  elected  to  live,  is  helping  his  fussy  promoter 
uncle,  a  Peruna  uncle,  to  sell  Tono-Bungay.  George 
goes  into  it  for  seven  years,  against  all  his  beliefs, 
for  practical  reasons. 

So  I  made  peace  with  my  uncle,  and  we  set  out  upon  this 
bright  enterprise  of  selling  slightly  injurious  rubbish  at  one- 
and-three-halfpence  and  two-and-nine  a  bottle,  including  the 
government  stamp.  We  made  Tono-Bungay  hum!  It 
brought  us  wealth,  influence,  respect,  the  confidence  of  end- 
less people.  All  that  my  uncle  promised  me  proved  truth 
and  understatement;  Tono-Bungay  carried  me  to  freedoms 
and  powers  that  no  life  of  scientific  research,  no  passionate 
service  of  humanity  could  ever  have  given  me.  .  .  . 

In  sketching  this  typical  "  bright  enterprise  "  Mr. 
Wells  has  not  done  anything  so  simple  as  to  expose 

[  105  ] 


the  promoter  and  the  present  business  system.  He 
does  caricature  the  plutocrat  and  ridicule  to  the  point 
of  anguish  all  the  hero-worshippers  and  apologists 
and  retainers  who  justify  the  speculator,  either  as  in- 
evitable or  desirable.  But  in  doing  this,  he  is  not  an 
aesthete  cavilling  and  whimpering  at  realities.  Mr. 
Wells  struggles  steadily  to  understand,  correlate  and 
focus  his  epoch.  In  the  country  house,  the  gentle- 
man's feudal  estate  now  often  occupied  by  mimetic 
Jews,  he  has  the  clue  to  England,  which  accounts, 
physically,  for  innumerable  disconnected  and  distract- 
ing phenomena. 

It  is  perhaps  the  philosophy  that  is  newest  and 
welcomest  in  Tono-Bungay.  As  a  novel,  it  is  far 
too  exuberant,  too  unsifted.  Mr.  Wells  has  tried 
to  cram  everything,  a  whole  epoch,  into  a  single  tale. 
For  not  only  is  there  the  country  house  in  it,  and  the 
company  promoter,  and  George  as  aerial  navigator 
and  builder  of  destroyers  —  but  there  is  the  entire 
delightful  humor  of  the  middle  class  in  Ponderevo's 
aunt,  and  in  George's  private  life  there  are  three 
love  experiences  —  the  first  with  Marion,  shallow, 
evasive,  pathetic;  the  second  a  passion  episode  with 
a  warmhearted,  "  magnificently  eupeptic  "  typist;  the 
third  the  romantic  love  with  an  aristocrat,  spoiled 
aristocrat.  And  there  is  the  Romance  of  the  Sea 
in  a  sailing  ship,  a  floating  fragment  of  slum,  and 
the  romance  of  the  tropics  in  a  section  where  Mr. 
Wells  is  deliberately  impish.  But,  whatever  hap- 
pens, it  is  the  narrator,  wielding  commonplace  and 
common  sense,  that  reveals  ourselves  to  ourselves. 

As  to  the  faults  of  Tono-Bungay,  many  exist. 
Perhaps  the  most  serious  is  the  lack  of  comedy. 
11  There's  no  humor  in  my  blood,"  George  truly 
£  106  J 


says.  "  I'm  earnest  in  warp  and  woof.  I  stumble 
and  flounder,  but  I  know  that  over  all  these  merry 
immediate  things,  there  are  other  things  that  are 
great  and  serene,  very  high,  beautiful  things  —  the 
reality.  I  haven't  got  it,  but  it  is  there  nevertheless. 
I'm  a  spiritual  guttersnipe  in  love  with  unimaginable 
goddesses.  I've  never  seen  the  goddesses  nor  ever 
shall  —  but  it  takes  all  the  fun  out  of  the  mud  — 
and  at  times  I  fear  it  takes  all  the  kindliness  too." 

There  is  the  modernist;  hard  on  himself  and 
others,  dark  with  doubt,  shot  with  aspiration,  beauty 
and  hope.  But  the  action  is  depressed  where  it 
might  consistently  be  sprightly  now  and  then.  Not 
that  Mr.  Wells  has  to  begin  a  chapter:  "It  was 
the  day  I  was  promoted  to  a  tooth-brush."  But  he 
might  at  least  remember  that  philosophically  one  is 
often  completely  miserable  while  factually  one  is  ex- 
ceedingly comfortable.  Schopenhauer  undoubtedly 
enjoyed  both  beefsteaks  and  sunsets.  And  this,  or 
its  aesthetic  equivalent,  the  reasonable  reader  can  ex- 
pect, even  if  he  is  aware  that  amiability,  gayety  and 
chivalry  are  special  arts  of  those  who  have  sunk  their 
moral  principal  in  the  prosy  annuity  of  a  code. 

There  is  another  point  about  Mr.  Wells  to  dis- 
relish, he  is  fond  of  hideous  metaphors,  metaphors 
from  the  refuse  can  and  the  scrap  heap.  "  I  re- 
solved that  if  ever  I  found  this  polypus  of  Tact  grow- 
ing up  in  my  soul,  I  would  tear  it  out  by  the  roots, 
throw  it  forth  and  stamp  on  it."  This  is  stamping 
on  tact  with  a  vengeance,  and  unworthy  of  the  man 
who  can  accomplish  such  clevernesses  as  "  these  Ox- 
ford men  are  the  Greeks  of  our  plutocratic  empire." 
There  were  two  lank  sons  "  dressed  in  conscien- 
tiously untidy  tweeds."  "  It's  the  pettiest  thing  to 

[  107  ] 


record,  I  know,  but  she  could  wear  curl  papers  in  my 
presence."  Or  the  girl  in  the  library:  "but  really, 
as  I  found  out  afterward,  she  never  read.  She  used 
to  come  there  to  eat  a  bun  in  quiet."  Or  the  vicar 
on  socialism :  "  *  They  have  some  intelligent  peo- 
ple in  their  ranks,  I  am  told,'  said  the  vicar,  '  writers 
and  so  forth.  Quite  a  distinguished  playwright,  my 
eldest  daughter  was  telling  me, —  I  forget  his  name. 
Milly,  dear!  Oh!  she's  not  here.  Painters,  too, 
they  have.  This  socialism,  it  seems  to  me,  is  part 
of  the  Unrest  of  the  Age.'  '  It  takes  a  fine  devotion 
to  lend  one's  ears  to  such  tattle  and  recall  it  and  set 
it  down. 

Such  is  Tono-Bungay,  with  its  inability  to  com- 
promise ideals  or  extenuate  curl  papers.  Such  it  is, 
with  its  observance  of  the  great  and  golden  rule  that 
"  the  more  distinct,  sharp  and  wiry  the  boundary 
line,  the  more  perfect  the  work  of  art."  It  is  a  book 
that  the  conservatives  may  not  enjoy,  but  it  extends 
the  frontiers  of  the  novel  and  sheds  sanitary  light  on 
many  dark  places  of  the  soul. 

March  26,  1909. 


I  108  ] 


THE  POLITICAL  COMET: 

THE    NEW   MACHIAVELLI 

IN  Tono-Bungay  H.  G.  Wells  criticised  the  tragic 
farce  of  modern  business  with  a  cleverness  incom- 
parable. Where  other  men  had  scratched  the  sur- 
face, Mr.  Wells  ripped  down  with  a  clean  surgical 
blade.  The  vulgarity  of  plutocrats,  the  fatuity  of 
competition,  the  idiocy  of  modern  Jew  aggressive- 
ness —  these  he  attacked  in  a  satire  as  sound  as  it 
was  hard.  Remarkable,  too,  was  his  version  of 
modern  love,  from  the  standpoint  of  adventure  and 
service.  And  apart  from  all  its  ideas  Tono-Bungay 
was  a  vivid,  nervous,  quick-moving,  multicolored  pic- 
ture of  the  modern  city  and  the  modern  man. 

Again,  in  The  New  Machiavelli,  Mr.  Wells  gives 
us  London  and  confused  contemporary  life.  But 
there  is  hardly  a  word  of  business,  except  of  the 
nouveaux  riches  in  Staffordshire.  The  new  Machi- 
avelli is  an  Englishman  of  42,  whose  political 
career  has  just  been  ended  by  divorce :  the  story  gives 
that  career  autobiographically,  in  all  its  white  pas- 
sion of  statecraft,  and  its  "  white  passions  struggling 
against  the  red." 

The  New  Machiavelli  is  no  more  like  the  ordi- 
nary novel  than  a  cup  of  blood  is  like  a  cup  of  milk. 
Into  every  line  of  the  story  Mr.  Wells  has  put  his 
wits,  his  imagination,  his  experience  and  his  personal- 
ity. Not  only  has  he  made  his  hero  his  own  age 
exactly,  not  only  has  he  made  him  the  living  ex- 

The  New  Machiavelli,  by  H.  G.  Wells.    Duffield,  New  York. 

E  109  ] 


c-iiplar  of  his  own  publicist  ideas ;  he  has  even  utilized 
such  known  experiences  as  his  visit  to  Chicago  (which 
place  he  flips  away  as  an  "  amazing  lapse  from  civili- 
zation "). 

How  far  Mr.  Wells  has  gone  in  utilizing  his  per- 
sonal experiences  is  his  own  affair.  But  that  he  has 
utilized  both  his  known  and  his  unknown  experiences 
is  quite  clear;  and  one's  most  vital  criticism  of  The 
New  Machiavelli  is  that  he  has  been  "  true  to  him- 
self "  in  a  literal  sense  at  the  expense  of  a  wiser  and 
more  sophisticated  truth.  For  in  this  amazing 
transcript  of  Mr.  Wells's  heart  and  mind,  this 
amazing,  headlong  confession,  there  is  precipitation 
of  much  which  is  irrelevant,  fatuous  and  egotistic. 
In  an  autobiography  such  things  suggest  the  living 
man.  In  a  novel  (which  is  intrinsically  conven- 
tional) they  suggest  an  author  bursting  with  his  own 
ego,  and  bursting  not  like  a  gas  that  turns  into  flame, 
but  like  a  gas  escaping  in  a  room ;  and  making  a  very 
unpleasant  odor. 

This  is  a  dangerous  thing  to  do,  if  one  is  born 
preacher  oneself,  and  Mr.  Wells  is  born  preacher. 
One  harangue  succeeds  another  in  The  New  Machi- 
avelli (fine  harangues  in  most  cases)  and  in  his  own 
person  H.  G.  Wells  is  continually  speaking,  con- 
tinually inviting  attention  to  his  person.  It  destroys 
one's  faith  in  the  actuality  of  The  New  Machiavelli. 
It  makes  him  a  mask  for  God  knows  what  personal 
purposes,  and  certainly  not  for  the  best  purposes  of 
art. 

Yet  as  soon  as  one  forgets  the  obtrusive,  restlessly 
self-centred  Mr.  Wells,  one  does  get  the  virus  of 
his  extraordinary  excitement  about  life.  Of  this  ex- 
citement, this  hectic  interest  in  affairs,  hectic  arnbi- 

[  nb] 


tion,  hectic  curiosity,  hectic  desire  to  know  and  to 
be,  to  have  others  know  and  have  others  be,  The 
New  Machiavelli  is  the  contagium.  I  say  hectic  be- 
cause I  think  Mr.  Wells  is  in  many  ways  unsafe  and 
insane.  Produced  in  a  metropolis  and  fed  up  on  all 
sorts  of  urban  notions,  theories  and  ideas,  he  mis- 
takes nightmares  for  visions  and  witty  theorizing  for 
important  cerebration.  Seeing  more  in  a  flash  of 
lightning  brain  than  one  out  of  ten  thousand,  he  still 
is  subject  to  illucid  intervals;  and  these  intervals 
occur,  as  they  are  apt  to  occur  with  clever  people,  in 
dealing  with  people  less  clever.  Mr.  Wells's  rapid 
little  brain  keeps  rapping  out  criticisms  that  are  as- 
tonishingly acute  and  astonishingly  inhuman. 

In  psychology  Richard  Remington,  the  new  Ma- 
chiavelli, is  very  similar  to  the  Mr.  Wells  of  First 
and  Last  Things.  He  is  an  idealist  who  dreams  of 
"  a  world  of  men  better  ordered,  happier,  finer,  se- 
cure, .  .  .  the  ending  of  muddle  and  diseases  and 
dirt  and  misery;  the  ending  of  confusions  that  waste 
human  possibilities."  His  catch  phrase  is  "  Love 
and  Fine  Thinking."  But  although  a  social  idealist 
loyal  to  ideas,  Remington  is  no  saint.  The  symbol 
of  his  state-making  dream;  Machiavelli  is  also  the 
symbol  of  "  his  animal  humor,  his  queer  indecent 
side,"  his  meanness,  his  selfishness,  and  his  squalor. 

Few  careers  could  be  more  interesting  than  that 
of  Remington,  once  he  starts  to  mount  politically, 
and  Mr.  Wells  is  unfailingly  clear  in  showing  the 
man's  evolution:  First  he  is  intellectual,  a  young 
liberal,  socialistically  inclined.  He  is  pushed  by  the 
Baileys,  two  self-appointed  guardians  of  reform's 
Thermopylean  Pass.  Altiora  Bailey  is  described  by 
Mr.  Wells  with  some  sharpness,  "  Altiora  thought 

[  in  ] 


trees  hopelessly  irregular  and  sea  cliffs  a  great  mis- 
take." Bailey  is  characterized  with  a  pointed  and 
almost  personal  malignance :  "  A  nasty,  oily,  effi- 
cient little  machine."  Despite  odious  characteristics, 
however,  these  are  profitable  allies  of  Remington's, 
and  he  stays  by  them,  breathing  hard  in  their  "  tre- 
mendously scientific  air  "  until  long  after  Altiora  has 
promoted  his  marriage. 

Courtship  is  not  romantic  in  Mr.  Wells.  The  sex 
side  of  Remington  is  very  frankly  represented  long 
before,  perhaps  more  frankly  than  the  sex  side  of 
any  man  in  English  fiction.  From  his  first  pre- 
cocious glance,  down  through  his  "  stark  fact " 
period  at  Cambridge,  and  his  celibate  experience  in 
London,  there  is  nothing  glossed  over  or  concealed. 
Something  may  be  misunderstood.  If  so,  the  mis- 
conception, the  lack  of  beauty,  is  inherent  in  Mr. 
Wells.  But  what  candor  can  give,  he  gives.  And 
that  is  admirable.  It  is  admirable  not  because  it 
is  beautifully  done,  but  because  it  is  done  so  honestly. 
Where  all,  even  the  best,  have  been  evasive,  it  is 
magnificent  that  one  should  be  true  and  explicit. 
The  Anthony  Comstocks  may  lie  about  it.  They 
may  say  that  Mr.  Wells  is  salacious,  indecent,  indeli- 
cate and  so  on.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mr.  Wells  is 
coldly  if  eagerly  clever.  He  is  much  less  salacious 
than  many  medical  textbooks.  He  tells  part  of  the 
truth  as  it  is  known  by  adults;  that  is  all.  And  only 
dirty-minded  people  like  Anthony  Comstock  will  ob- 
ject to  it. 

Being  an  English  middle-class  boy,  Remington  is 
brought  up  under  the  assumption  that  ignorance 
fosters  idealism.  The  result  is,  as  usual,  inglorious. 
"  I  had  had  my  experiences  and  secrets  and  adven- 

[  112] 


tures,"  he  says,  "  among  that  fringe  of  ill-mated  or 
erratic  or  discredited  women  the  London  world  pos- 
sesses. The  thing  had  long  ago  ceased  to  be  a  mat- 
ter of  magic  or  mystery,  and  had  become  a  question 
of  appetites  and  excitement,  and  among  other  things 
the  excitement  of  not  being  found  out."  That  sex 
should  have  become  "  a  question  of  appetites  and  ex- 
citement "  is  an  indication  of  what  ignorance  leads 
to,  in  a  Remington.  And  no  lovable  woman  saved 
Remington.  "  I  had  never  yet  even  peeped  at  the 
sweetest,  profoundest  thing  in  the  world,  the  heart 
and  meaning  of  a  girl,  or  dreamt  with  any  quality  of 
reality  of  a  wife  or  any  such  thing  as  a  friend  among 
womanhood." 

Margaret,  a  tepid  character,  is  unfortunate  to 
marry  Remington.  She  is  a  good  woman,  depicted 
without  prejudice;  cultivated,  moral  and  conven- 
tional. She  would  willingly  die  for  her  husband, 
but  she  must  make  an  issue  of  his  saying  "  damn." 
The  estrangement  is  fated.  From  the  start  "  trifling 
things  began  to  matter  enormously,  that  she  had  a 
weak  and  easily  fatigued  back  for  example,  or  that 
when  she  knitted  her  brows  and  stammered  a  little 
in  talking,  it  really  didn't  mean  that  an  exquisite  sig- 
nificance was  struggling  for  utterance."  What  Rem- 
ington could  not  turn  to  delight  made  him  bitter. 
He  could  not  indulge  without  loving,  and  he  did  not 
love. 

When  a  man  who  needs  so  much  as  Remington 
marries  a  woman  so  patently  and  pitifully  inade- 
quate as  Margaret,  what  is  he  to  do?  Remington 
goes  on  as  a  "  careerist,"  more  and  more  occupied 
with  political  ideals,  and  now  shifting,  for  Machi- 
avellian reasons,  from  the  Liberal  to  the  Conserva- 


five  machine.  His  ideas  of  party  are  amazingly 
vivid  and  significant.  They  exhibit  at  once  the  fluid- 
ity and  the  accessibility  of  his  character.  They  do 
not  for  a  moment  sound  like  an  executive's  ideas,  and 
they  are  full  of  wind,  full  of  Zeitgeist.  But  they 
serve  both  Remington  and  Mr.  Wells  in  the  exposi- 
tion of  statecraft:  they  give  excuse  for  as  brilliant  a 
chapter  on  the  party  system  as  one  could  hope  to 
find  anywhere. 

One's  fundamental  criticism,  however,  is  that 
Remington,  esteeming  himself  tough-minded,  is,  as 
a  fact,  utterly  and  unhealthily  critical  of  human  na- 
ture, impatient  of  limitations  in  others,  and  in  him- 
self, that  are  "  limitations  "  only  from  the  stand- 
point of  a  "  nasty,  oily,  efficient  little  machine."  It 
is  this  prejudgment  of  human  nature,  this  impatience 
of  "  chaotic  indiscipline,  ill-adjusted  efforts,  spas- 
modic aims,"  that  makes  Wells  so  querulous  and  so 
childish.  He  is  too  hard  on  himself,  on  this  score, 
and  much  too  hard  on  others.  Were  he  strong 
enough,  were  we  strong  enough,  to  achieve  his  ideal, 
all  would  be  well;  the  ideal  is  logical,  spick-and-span. 
But  not  being  strong  enough  as  yet,  nagging  each 
other  does  no  good.  And  one  gets  so  tired  of  Mr. 
Wells's  intrinsically  stupid  nagging,  especially  as  the 
muddlement,  the  disorder,  the  indiscipline,  the  ill- 
adjustment,  the  spasmodic  behavior,  of  his  own  hero 
are  more  and  more  confessed. 

But  while  Remington's  career  preoccupies  him,  so 
long  as  no  woman  attracts  him,  he  is  in  a  peculiarly 
susceptible  position  when  he  meets  Isabel  Rivers. 
She  is  a  person  of  the  clearest  charm,  a  delightful, 
lovable  and  admirable  woman :  and  so  much  too  good 
for  Remington  that  one  does  not  believe  he  would  in 

[  114] 


reality  run  away  with  her.  For  that  is  Wells's  solu- 
tion, his  answer  given  without  moral  defense.  He 
sends  Isabel  and  Remington  off  together,  the 
choosers  of  an  evil.  Whether  the  lesser  or  the 
greater,  he  does  not  dare  to  say. 

After  all  the  moil,  all  the  contradiction,  all  the  con- 
fusion, all  the  neurosis  of  Remington's  life  till  he 
meets  Isabel,  it  is  a  great  relief  to  experience  their 
big  and  heartfelt  harmonies.  The  passages  between 
them  are  beautiful,  and  wonderfully  actual.  The 
woman  loves  without  stint,  is  clear-headed,  unafraid 
and  passionate.  It  is  only  when  Remington  tells  his 
wife  about  it,  tells  her  he  "  knew  it  was  stupid,  but 
thought  it  was  a  thing  that  wouldn't  change,  wouldn't 
be  anything  but  itself,  wouldn't  unfold  conse- 
quences," that  one  is  utterly  disgusted.  In  the  same 
tone  is  the  whine  that  "  this  business  has  brought 
me  more  bitterness  and  sorrow  than  I  had  ever  ex- 
pected to  bear."  In  the  same  tone  is  the  feeble 
protestation  that  there  is  "  a  sort  of  wild  right- 
ness  about  any  love  that  is  fraught  with  beauty." 
Would  a  man  capable  of  such  doubts,  such  maunder- 
ings  about  expediency,  such  reproaches  and  hand- 
wringing,  be  capable  also  of  the  final  drastic  step? 
One  feels  dubious.  Remington  wears  fine  feathers, 
but  it  is  hard  to  believe  they  are  his  own.  And 
when  he  hands  Isabel  over  to  a  good,  conventional 
man  who  wants  to  marry  her,  without  one  reflection 
as  to  what  such  prostitution  means,  the  action  con- 
sists much  more  with  going  back  to  his  wife  than 
with  his  final  flaming  resolution  to  take  exile  and 
love. 

With  so  much  to  urge  against  the  philosophy  of 
this  remarkable  novel,  it  may  seem  captious  to  go 


further  and  criticise  its  construction.  But  indeed  it 
is  badly  put  together  and  badly  managed.  Mr. 
Wells  is  a  real  stylist,  a  master  of  actuality,  and  the 
vignettes  of  London  in  The  New  Machiavelli  are  un- 
matched in  contemporary  fiction.  Yet  there  is  an 
excess  of  cleverness  and  a  tiresome  triteness  of 
epithet.  Over  and  over  again  Mr.  Wells  uses  such 
words  as  "  vast,"  "  splendid,"  "  enormous,"  "  stu- 
pendous," "passionate,"  "  irresistible,"  "  extraordi- 
i  nary,"  "  immense."  These  words  are  not  exactly 
leprous,  and  several  of  them  are  applicable  to  the 
book  itself;  but  in  Mr.  Wells  they  are  extravagantly 
and  flippantly  used.  And  they  give  an  effect  of 
puerile  sensationalism  which  a  radical  cannot  afford. 

But  the  bad  construction  is  not  a  matter  of  heaped 
up  epithets  and  ejaculatory  statement.  It  is  a  mat- 
ter of  impeded  and  disconcerted  narrative.  The 
narrative  is  forever  being  halted  for  the  sake  of  a 
sermon.  No  reminiscence  seems  to  be  complete 
without  a  debate,  and  no  description  without  a  moral. 
When  one  thinks  of  a  masterly  story  like  Jean- 
Christophe,  this  seems  flimsy  and  ill  conceived.  It 
is  held  together  by  pins,  strings,  needles,  tags,  clips, 
everything  but  the  conventional  buttons  and  threads. 
"  I'll  tell  you  a  little  later,"  "  It  is  very  hard  to  tell," 
"  I  must  go  back  a  little  way  " —  how  distracting  and 
inefficient. 

It  is  this  parvenu  in  Mr.  Wells  that  leads  him  to 
take  nothing  for  granted,  that  leads  him  to  put  the 
universe  on  trial.  And,  incidentally,  it  is  this  par- 
venu in  him  which  makes  him  attempt  to  win  dis- 
tinction by  shunning  familiar  names  for  most  of  his 
characters,  and  call  them  Blupp,  Willersley,  Mot- 
tisham,  Clynes,  Esmeer,  Bunting  Harblow,  Clading- 


bowl,  Tumpany,  Bulch,  Pipes,  Toomer,  Waulsort, 
Rumbold,  Minns,  Tohrns,  Kindling,  Crupp,  Flack, 
Wrassleton,  Forthundred,  Paddockshurst,  Plutus, 
Fester,  Panmure  and  Quackett.  I  resent  all  these 
odd  names  especially  Quackett. 

More  serious  is  his  effort  to  clear  out  weeds  by 
slashing  thistles  with  a  vicious  cane.  More  serious 
is  his  willingness  to  believe  of  the  poor  that  "  mean 
fears  enslave  them,  and  satisfactions  decoy  them." 
Such  half  truths  are  disheartening  from  Mr.  Wells. 

Perhaps  the  megalomania  of  Remington,  of  which 
these  are  symptoms,  is  deliberate.  If  so,  I  have 
read  the  book  in  the  wrong  spirit.  And  at  any  rate 
the  book  is  a  stimulant  not  to  be  refused.  It  is  easy 
to  understand  people  being  apathetic  to  Mr.  Wells. 
But  while  absence  of  desire  sometimes  indicates  re- 
finement, it  more  often  indicates  anaemia;  and  Mr. 
Wells  challenges  the  anaemic.  He  is  not  a  scrupu- 
lous artist.  He  writes  in  a  riot  of  the  blood.  He 
undervalues  the  poised  and  the  equable.  His  mind 
at  present  is  restless,  perplexed,  feverish  and  unprin- 
cipled. And  he  favors  change  for  its  own  sake, 
captiously.  It  is  easy  to  repudiate  many  things  in 
Mr.  Wells.  But  he  is  better  to  assimilate  than  to 
reject.  To  assimilate  him  is  to  assimilate  him  as  a 
man  in  whom  there  is  much  that  is  provocative  (as 
where  he  criticizes  Liberals)  much  that  is  suggestive 
(as  where  he  criticizes  the  old  ideals  of  education), 
much  that  is  fine.  He  has  the  yeast  of  life  in  him, 
the  microbe  of  adventure.  And  to  exclude  him  is 
to  cut  off  an  influence  which,  if  not  wholly  reasoned 
or  successfully  sublimated,  still  has  vitality  irresisti* 
ble  and  staunch  sincerities. 

January  20,  ign. 

[  "7] 


RESHAPING  THE  WORLD: 

THE    RESEARCH    MAGNIFICENT 

SlNCE  The  New  Machiavelli  something  essential 
of  H.  G.  Wells  has  been  in  a  state  of  suspension. 
The  Wife  of  Sir  Isaac  Harmon,  The  World  Set 
Free,  The  Passionate  Friends,  Marriage  —  what- 
ever their  aim  and  success,  they  left  a  promise  un- 
fulfilled. But  The  Research  Magnificent  fulfills  this 
promise.  It  is,  to  put  it  roughly,  another  epochal 
tale.  It  carries  on  the  enterprise  of  the  earlier  con- 
fidential novels,  carries  on  the  immense  task  of 
focussing  inclusively  the  epoch  as  Mr.  Wells  sees  it, 
and  his  own  spiritual  relations  to  the  epoch. 

What  this  means  is  readily  imaginable  by  the  ad- 
mirers of  Mr.  Wells.  It  is  far  more  than  the  con- 
tribution of  an  orthodox  novel.  Orthodox  novelists 
aim  at  the  moving  world  from  a  fixed  platform  at 
best;  mainly  they  take  targets  pinned  on  trees  or 
pot  at  clay  pigeons.  They  certainly  do  not  attempt 
to  dramatize  their  current  philosophy  in  their  ver- 
sion of  the  moving  world.  But  this  is  precisely 
Mr.  Wells's  distinction.  Not  content,  as  he  might 
be,  to  dramatize  an  epoch  in  an  Old  Wives'  Tale, 
nor  yet  to  give  his  philosophy  the  vivid  but  unhis- 
toric  epitome  of  a  Sartor  Resartus,  he  strives  for 
the  sake  of  reality  to  secure  for  his  generalizations 

The  Research  Magnificent,  by  H.  G.  Wells.    Macmillan,  New 
York, 


the  supremely  telling  corroboration  of  fiction.  He 
seems  determined  in  these  revelatory  novels  to  ad- 
here very  closely  to  his  own  spiritual  experiences. 
But  he  aims  also  to  fling  his  imagination  hard  enough 
out  of  autobiography  to  embody  that  experience  in 
an  authentic  plot.  It  is  a  stupendous  effort  to  make 
available  all  the  torrents  of  his  vitality. 

So  far  as  technique  is  concerned,  he  has  never  done 
better  than  here.  The  Research  Magnificent  is  ex- 
tremely eloquent.  It  has  maturity,  gravity,  ardor. 
It  has  diversity  of  action  and  dazzling  variety  of 
scene.  It  has  richness  and  sustainment  of  intention. 
Mr.  Wells  is  not  depending  on  old  inspirations.  As 
life  goes  on,  fresh  streams  replenish  him.  The 
momentum  of  his  genius  cuts  deep  enough  to  release 
gorging  waters  from  levels  untapped  before.  To 
select,  to  compress,  to  order,  to  dominate  this  stream 
of  visions,  suggestions,  moods,  passions,  inquisitions, 
resolutions,  tendernesses,  irritabilities;  to  keep  out 
of  irrelevancies  and  impostures  —  that  is  his  modest 
task,  and  he  has  superbly  performed  it.  The  little 
Cockney  bestrides  the  movement  and  imagery  of  the 
world. 

But  while  Mr.  Wells  has  invented  the  medium 
which  could  rightly  accommodate  his  teeming  mind, 
the  bent  of  that  mind  is  not  necessarily  to  be  so  joy- 
ously acclaimed. 

The  career  which  Mr.  Wells  compacts  in  The  Re- 
search Magnificent  is  a  man's  career,  English  and 
modern.  Benham  was  born,  one  estimates,  about 
1882.  The  son  of  an  estranged  marriage,  the  fa- 
ther a  fusty  schoolmaster,  the  mother  a  bright  and 
wealthy  presence  in  London,  he  gravitated  to  his 
mother  during  his  development  as  an  intellectual  in 


Cambridge.  He  left  Cambridge  in  1903,  brilliant 
but  "  unbalanced,"  coming  into  his  unheralded  for- 
tune of  $30,000  a  year.  He  spent  the  next  year  in 
London  at  loose  ends,  much  in  the  hands  of  a  valet, 
postponing  his  Career,  and  having  his  affair  with 
Mrs.  Skelmersdale.  Then,  after  a  revulsion,  he 
met  Amanda  — "  a  sunlit  young  woman  with  a  leap- 
ing stride  in  her  paces  " —  and  married  her  out  of 
hand  in  1904,  Amanda  being  nineteen.  The  "  spir- 
ited honeymoon  "  took  them  to  Italy,  the  Adriatic, 
Albania.  The  sunlit  young  woman,  however, 
thirsted  for  London,  an  "  enormous  juicy  fruit  wait- 
ing for  her  pretty  white  teeth."  They  returned, 
Benham  grimly  at  odds.  He  broke  away  in  1905, 
going  to  Russia  after  the  murder  of  Sergius.  He  re- 
turned in  November  to  find  her  demurely  pre-mater- 
nal,  destined  to  have  his  child.  Christmas  he  spent 
in  Moscow,  went  on  to  Rostov,  Astrakhan,  Herat. 
At  Karachi  he  learned  he  was  a  father,  the  child  a 
son.  He  hurried  home.  His  son  was  "  very  red 
and  ugly  " —  better  than  blue  and  ugly  —  and  very 
soon  he  again  departed.  Amanda  had  meanwhile 
adventured  for  herself.  Her  letters  became  inani- 
mate. Off  Madras  her  certain  unfaithfulness 
dawned  on  him.  At  Colombo  his  mother's  flaming 
letter  confirmed  it.  More  carfare  —  he  started 
home.  His  emotion  evanesced  at  Amanda's  ready 
submissiveness,  her  willingness  to  play  double  with 
the  lover-slave.  After  the  break  he  careered  to 
Odessa,  Bessarabia,  Kieff;  hurried  on  to  the  Swa- 
deshi outbreak  in  India,  continued  to  China,  "  that 
great  teeming  stinking  tank  of  humorous  yellow  hu- 
manity." Germany  he  visited  in  1910,  America  and 
Hayti.  In  1913  he  was  in  the  midst  of  labor  trou- 

[  120  ] 


bles  in  Johannesburg,  and  there  in  a  strike  riot  he 
was  killed.  His  age  would  be  about  31  or  there- 
abouts, two  years  older  than  the  woman  he  left,  but 
did  not  suspend  communication  with,  in  1906. 

From  this  skeleton  of  dates  and  places  no  one 
could  infer  anything,  and  yet  it  is  the  skeleton  which 
is  clothed  by  the  magnificent  research.  For  this 
youngster's  travels  were  not  the  pouncings  of  a  rest- 
less plutocratic  insect.  They  were  deliberate  and 
consecrated  excursions  into  the  "  collective  mind." 
When  he  left  Cambridge  thirsting  for  nobility,  the 
only  services  that  invited  him  were  science,  philoso- 
phy, politics.  Accepting  the  latter,  he  rejected  jour- 
nalism and  party,  "  plebeian's  submission  to  the  cur- 
rents of  life  about  him."  To  live  nobly,  to  live  thor- 
oughly and  dangerously,  was  his  passion.  And  so, 
with  travel  as  his  means  of  education,  he  gave  him- 
self up  to  "  the  idea  of  working  out  for  himself,  thor- 
oughly and  completely,  a  political  scheme,  a  theory 
of  his  work  and  duty  in  the  world,  a  plan  of  the 
world's  future  that  should  give  a  rule  for  his  life." 
His  death,  quite  incidental,  was  in  no  way  intended. 
It  came  out  of  a  spurt  of  temperament,  part  of  u  the 
general  humor  of  life." 

Where  Benham  is  most  real  to  me  is  in  his  strug- 
gles to  transcend  fear  and  pain,  his  bravery  in  the 
jungle,  his  enforced  courage  in  the  mountains  and 
his  bravery  in  the  ghetto  of  Kieff.  Tiresome  as  are 
some  of  his  problems  — "  should  an  aristocrat  be 
deterred  by  the  fear  of  smashing  people  up?  " — he 
is  unqualifiedly  splendid  in  his  account  of  the  baser 
limitations;  and  there  is  rich  humor  in  his  self-willed 
behavior  with  the  lickerish  innkeeper  in  the  Alps. 
All  this  is  glorious.  There  is  also  something  warm 

[  121  ] 


about  his  intimacy  with  Prothero,  the  man  without 
pride.  But  throughout  the  story  there  is  something 
not  glorious,  some  taint  which  is  not  remitted  for  all 
the  continued  apologia  of  Mr.  Wells. 

One  sympathizes  with  Mr.  Wells  in  his  warranted 
hatred  of  confusion  and  muddle,  his  high  impatience 
with  triviality  and  futility,  his  rage  against  "  mis- 
management, fear,  indulgence,  jealousy,  prejudice, 
stupidity,"  all  the  baseness  that  beguile  the  divinity 
in  man.  One  is  stirred  profoundly  by  his  vision  of 
fine  purpose  and  self-anointed  zeal,  by  his  sense  that 
"  we  are  working  out  a  new  way  of  living  for  man- 
kind, a  new  rule,  a  new  conscience."  Nothing  could 
be  more  inspiring  than  his  conviction  that  men  have 
only  to  resolve  to  be  "  lordly  free,  filled  and  sus- 
tained by  pride."  But  the  surprise  of  this  novel  is 
its  conviction  that  everything  muddled  is  popular 
and  everything  popular  is  muddled.  The  only  peo- 
ple "  worth  consideration  "  are  intellectuals,  and  of 
these  only  one  seems  to  survive.  Everything  base 
is  identified  with  democracy  and  the  interchange  of 
wills.  There  is  almost  shrieking  emphasis  that  the 
greatest  need  in  life  is  a  predisposition  to  nobility 
and  rule.  Economic  determinism  is  deposed.  In 
its  place,  "  richesse  oblige."  Mr.  Wells  talks  like  a 
neophyte  of  the  governing  class.  His  mind  cracks 
with  new-found  responsibilities  of  nobility,  and  he 
cries  from  cover  to  cover  for  lordliness,  kingliness, 
princeliness,  knighthood,  like  an  advance  agent  for 
some  mystic  shrine. 

'  This  age  of  confusion  is  Democracy;  it  is  all 
that  Democracy  can  ever  give  us.  Democracy,  if 
it  means  anything,  means  the  rule  of  the  planless 
man,  the  rule  of  the  unkempt  mind.  It  means  as  a 

[  122  ] 


consequence  this  vast  boiling  up  of  collectively  mean- 
ingless things." 

The  Balkan  states  give  him  a  further  text.  There 
isn't  one  element  in  that  imbroglio  "  that  deserves  a 
moment's  respect  from  a  sane  man." 

You  see  this  is  what  men  are  where  there  is  no  power,  no 
discipline,  no  ruler,  no  responsibility.  This  is  a  masterless 
world.  This  is  pure  democracy.  This  is  the  natural  state 
of  men.  This  is  the  world  of  the  bully  and  the  brigand  and 
assassin,  the  world  of  the  mud-pelter  and  the  brawler,  the 
world  of  the  bent  woman,  the  world  of  the  flea  and  fly,  the 
open  drain  and  the  baying  dog.  This  is  what  the  British 
sentimentalist  thinks  a  noble  state  for  man. 

How  is  one  to  account  for  this  dreary  nonsense? 
I  confess  I  can  only  do  so  by  suggesting  a  scrutiny 
of  the  conflict  between  Benham  and  Amanda.  Mr. 
Wells  convinces  himself  that  the  relation  is  under- 
standably wrecked  on  the  rock  of  the  research  mag- 
nificent. 

Amanda  loved  wild  and  picturesque  things,  and  Benham 
strong  and  clear  things;  the  vines  and  brushwood  amidst  the 
ruins  of  Salona  that  had  delighted  her  had  filled  him  with 
a  sense  of  tragic  retrogression.  Salona  had  revived  again  in 
the  acutest  form  a  dispute  that  had  been  smoldering  between 
them  throughout  a  fitful  and  lengthy  exploration  of  north 
and  central  Italy.  She  could  not  understand  his  disgust 
with  the  mediaeval  color  and  confusion  that  had  swamped 
the  pride  and  state  of  the  Roman  Empire,  and  he  could  not 
make  her  feel  the  ambition  of  the  ruler,  the  essential  disci- 
pline and  responsibilities  of  his  aristocratic  idea.  While  his 
adventurousness  was  conquest,  hers,  it  was  only  too  mani- 
fest, was  brigandage.  His  thoughts  ran  now  into  the  form 
of  an  imaginary  discourse,  that  he  would  never  deliver  to 
her,  on  the  decay  of  states,  on  the  triumph  of  barbarians  over 

[  123  1 


rulers  who  will  not  rule,  on  the  relaxation  of  patrician 
orders  and  the  return  of  the  robber  and  assassin  as  lordship 
decays. 

This  account  of  male  and  female  may  convince 
some  people,  especially  with  the  later  apologia. 
"  I'm  an  overstrung  man.  I  go  harshly  and  con- 
tinuously for  one  idea.  I  live  as  I  ride.  I  blunder 
through  my  fences.  I  take  off  too  soon.  I've  no 
natural  ease  of  mind  or  conduct  of  body."  It  is 
very  touching.  But  if  the  natural  predisposition  to 
rule  gave  us  many  Amandas  I  should  be  all  for  put- 
ting chipped  ice  on  the  head  of  the  ruler.  It  seems 
to  me  a  quite  ordinary  case  of  muddled  and  deso- 
lating egoism,  with  the  Research  as  a  convenient 
afterthought.  As  for  the  conclusion  that  there  are 
as  yet  "  no  feminine  aristocrats,  rulers  and  mates 
of  rulers,"  it  is  the  kind  of  repudiation  which  re- 
bcunds  on  the  man  by  whom  it  is  made. 

One  of  the  extraordinary  facts  about  this  extraor- 
dinary novel  is  that  the  child  born  to  Benham  is  ab- 
solutely never  mentioned  subsequent  to  his  birth. 
Sir  Philip  Easton  — "  Pip  " —  apparently  fathers  it. 
Benham,  at  any  rate,  the  real  father,  literally  never 
gives  it  a  second  thought.  It  is  a  coldness  not  easy 
to  explain. 

Mr.  Wells  wants  perfection,  but  he  seeks  to  ar- 
rive by  aviation.  He  wishes  to  soar  over  "  the  naive 
passions  and  self-interest  of  the  common  life."  It 
is  a  high  ambition  and  it  has  produced  a  wonderful 
book  in  The  Research  Magnificent.  Yet  the  book 
does  not  seem  to  me  to  possess  fundamental  truth- 
fulness. Genius,  nobility  and  sick  egoism  combine 
in  it,  to  the  additional  muddle  of  mankind. 

September  2$,  1915. 

[124] 


MR.  WELLS  DISCOVERS  GOD: 

MR.    BRITLING 

write  a  novel  on  the  heels  of  direct  experience 
is  one  of  Mr.  Wells's  greatest  gifts.  It  is  as  simple 
for  him  to  tell  a  story  embodying  the  moods  of  the 
minute  as  for  a  camera  to  catch  a  diver  in  mid  air. 
Most  men  take  years  to  bring  their  own  relations 
into  focus.  It  is  the  convention  for  men  to  wait 
until  their  own  story  is  finished  before  they  write 
their  autobiography  with  a  palsied  hand.  Mr. 
Wells  has  for  a  long  time  vigorously  disregarded 
this  convention.  He  no  more  needs  the  stability  of 
historical  consensus  for  his  guidance  than  a  lightning 
calculator  needs  a  pencil  and  pad.  Mr.  Wells  does 
not  simply  take  the  background  of  his  own  time  into 
consideration.  He  takes  the  shifting  ideas,  the  ka- 
leidoscopic mind.  This  is  irregular.  It  is  "  jour- 
nalistic." It  is  the  introduction  of  spit-ball  methods 
into  fiction.  It  is  speeding  up  the  profession  of 
novel-writing  in  an  anti-union  way.  In  spite  of  its 
parvenu  aspect,  however,  it  is  Mr.  Wells's  greatest 
triumph,  and  it  now  enables  him  to  write  a  genuine 
novel  of  the  war. 

Mr.  Britling  may  seem  autobiographical.  It  is 
a  happy  circumstance  of  authorship  that  those  ex- 
periences which  Mr.  Wells  recently  suffered  as  a 
middle-aged  Englishman  in  the  Zeppelin  area  should 

Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through,  by  H.  G.  Wells.    Macraillan,  New 
York. 

C    125   ] 


be  resumed  so  substantially  by  Mr.  Britling.  Mr. 
Britling  is  not,  however,  Mr.  Wells.  No  good 
novel  could  be  strictly  autobiographical.  To  sup- 
pose that  a  novel  is  autobiographical  is  to  accuse  a 
painter  of  using  actual  grass  on  his  canvas.  It  is 
to  put  imaginative  integrity  out  of  the  question. 
Mr.  Britling  is  not  Mr.  Wells.  He  is  merely  a  sym- 
pathetic twin  caught  by  Mr.  Wells  in  the  astonishing 
act  of  duplicating  Mr.  Wells's  experiences.  Be- 
tween them  there  is  a  decent  severance.  Mr.  Wells 
can  hold  Mr.  Britling  in  his  eye.  But  because  Mr. 
Wells  is  himself  a  prosperous  Englishman  between 
40  and  50,  a  writer  on  world  affairs,  a  married  man 
with  children,  a  person  of  the  same  courageous,  hope- 
ful, gusty,  amorous  disposition,  a  person  writing  a 
very  similar  handwriting  and  with  almost  the  same 
intonations,  we  can  congratulate  ourselves  on  the 
facility  with  which  Mr.  Britling  can  be  affixed.  It 
is  not  sound  to  identify  Mr.  Wells  completely  with 
his  own  Mr.  Britling.  That  would  be  subtly  yet 
infinitely  misleading.  But  it  is  important  immensely 
that  Mr.  Wells  has  conceived  a  gentleman  standing 
pretty  much  in  the  same  shoes.  Mr.  Wells  can  on 
that  account  afford  to  say,  "  I  know  my  Britling." 
We  in  turn,  haply  interested  in  the  author,  can  after 
due  allowance  observe,  "  So  much  the  better  do  we 
know  our  Wells." 

We  not  only  know  him  better,  we  know  him  as 
never  before.  There  is  no  intimation  of  class  or 
quality  in  saying  "  Wells's  new  book."  He  is  as 
variable  as  he  is  varied.  He  is  so  much  a  genius 
that  nothing  about  him  can  be  predicted  beforehand, 
not  even  his  genius.  He  has  a  mind  like  a  Klondike 
and  as  many  surprises  as  the  gold-rush  territory  it- 

[  126  ] 


self.  But  this  novel  of  the  war,  serialized  to  its 
own  detriment  as  it  was,  can  be  defined  as  a  glorious 
success.  It  is  so  much  a  novel  of  genius  as  to  end 
oscillation  as  to  Mr.  Wells's  perceptions.  It  cannot 
fail  for  some  readers  to  mean  a  permanent  resump- 
tion of  belief  in  the  spiritual  intelligibility  of  Mr. 
Wells. 

It  is  a  little  worse  than  useless,  so  far  as  such 
reassurance  is  concerned,  to  say  that  Mr.  Britling 
is  a  novel  of  the  war.  There  are  things  that  Mr. 
Wells  has  said  about  the  war  which  had  not,  so  to 
speak,  spiritual  intelligibility.  One  of  them  was 
that  little  spurt  of  cold  fury  which  was  shot  at  Amer- 
ica in  the  Everybody's  symposium  —  a  sort  of 
venomed  transatlantic  spit.  Because  he  loved  Eng- 
land Mr.  Wells  looked  on  America  in  the  way  the 
wife  of  a  hero  who  is  being  walloped  might  look  on 
a  cautious,  legally  righteous,  non-interfering  friend 
next  door.  And  when  Mr.  Wells  is  moved  under 
such  circumstances  he  employs  the  cool  style  of  the 
publicist  to  carry  the  spleen  of  Seven  Dials.  But 
it  is  not  that  kind  of  novel  which  Mr.  Wells  has  writ- 
ten in  Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through.  There  is  in 
H.  G.  Wells  a  great  deal  of  passionateness  which 
leads  him  to  lash  out  at  everything  which  crosses 
him,  to  speak  with  bristling  contemptuousness  of  one 
order  of  beings  after  another.  In  that  he  is  like  the 
sanguine,  generous  Mr.  Britling.  But  the  value  of 
Mr.  Britling  is  its  revelation  of  this  apparently  feral 
nature  under  the  supreme  test  of  a  highly  national- 
istic war.  Then  the  wildness  is  found  to  be  noth- 
ing worse  than  the  violence  of  sensitiveness,  a  sensi- 
tiveness that  in  another  mood  is  the  magic  carpet  to 
all  that  is  alien.  Goaded  at  first  by  the  war,  Mr. 

[  127  ] 


B rifling  ends  by  interpreting  even  bereavement. 
He  ends  by  "  seeing  it  through."  And  in  the  proc- 
esses of  searching  his  soul  he  does  not  rest  on  his 
first  impulse,  to  maintain  merely  the  assailed  good- 
ness of  England,  "  the  deep  and  long  unspoken  de- 
sire for  kindliness  and  fairness."  He  faces  "  the 
deeper  riddles  of  essential  evil  and  of  conceivable 
changes  in  the  heart  of  man."  He  avoids  the  allure- 
ments of  "  ineffective  gentleness."  He  goes  through 
the  "  pessimistic  pit."  He  comes  to  admit  that  the 
issues  of  the  war  lack  the  simple  greatness  that 
would  make  the  stern  happiness  of  stoicism  possible. 
He  accepts  the  existence  of  "  the  truer  Germany 
that  is  thought  and  system  "  and  acknowledges  its 
conflict  with  an  England  not  all  ways  great.  In 
the  account  of  these  mutations  there  is  a  candor  so 
passionate  and  thorough,  a  humor  so  large  and  lov- 
able, a  self-knowledge  so  humble,  that  one  can 
hardly  restrain  admiration.  It  is  a  change  from  the 
contentiousness  of  Mr.  Wells,  as  if  trip-hammers 
made  music  and  dentists  employed  wooden  needles. 
'  The  reversional  trend  given  by  warlike  experi- 
ence and  warlike  preoccupation,"  says  Thorstein 
Veblen,  makes  "  for  a  reversion  to  the  Grace  of 
God."  Perhaps  it  is  that  that  helps  Mr.  Britling  to 
seem  mellow.  But  the  best  of  the  book  appears  to 
me  to  come  before  this  note  is  struck.  I  can  un- 
derstand Mr.  Britling  discovering  God,  his  God  of 
limited  liability. 

Hitherto  God  had  been  for  him  a  thing  of  the  intelligence, 
a  theory,  a  report,  something  told  about  but  not  realized. 
...  Mr.  Britling's  thinking  about  God  hitherto  had  been 
like  some  one  who  has  found  an  empty  house,  very  beautiful 
and  pleasant,  full  of  the  promise  of  a  fine  personality.  And 

[  128] 


then  as  the  discoverer  makes  his  lonely,  curious  explorations, 
he  hears  downstairs,  dear  and  friendly,  the  voice  of  the 
Master  coming  in.  ...  There  was  no  need  to  despair  be- 
cause he  himself  was  one  of  the  feeble  folk.  God  was  with 
him  indeed,  and  he  was  with  God.  The  King  was  coming 
to  his  own.  Amidst  the  darknesses  and  confusions,  the 
nightmare  stupidities  and  the  hideous  cruelties  of  the  great 
war,  God,  the  Captain  of  the  World  Republic,  fought  his 
way  to  empire.  So  long  as  one  did  one's  best  and  utmost 
in  a  cause  so  mighty,  did  it  matter  though  the  thing  one 
did  was  little  and  poor. 

One  can  understand  it,  this  God  as  companion  of 
the  urgent  soul,  this  generous  adjustment  of  so  pas- 
sionate a  nature  to  the  necessities  of  a  world  in 
change. 

To  Mr.  Britling  in  his  hours  of  nocturnal  imagi- 
nation, hours  when  the  molehills  throw  mountainous 
shadows  on  the  mind,  the  world  readily  became  an 
egg,  and  "  he  had  the  subconscious  delusion  that  he 
had  laid  it."  Instead  of  encouraging  this  delusion, 
as  Mr.  Wells  seemed  to  do  in  The  Research  Mag- 
nificent, he  gives  it  deeply  humorous  interpretation. 
There  are  adventures  asking  for  courage  and  great- 
ness in  Mr.  Britling,  although  he  is  only  "  a  writer, 
a  footnote  to  reality."  But  there  is  no  urgent  feel- 
ing that  the  world  must  advert  to  him  or  blow  up. 

Perhaps  because  Mr.  Wells  has  these  proportions 
for  Mr.  Britling,  the  book  seems  unusually  witty. 
"  Britain  was  not  a  state  —  it  was  an  unincorporated 
people."  "  What  is  the  good  of  all  this  clamoring 
for  a  change  of  government.  We  haven't  a  change 
of  government.  It's  like  telling  a  tramp  to  get  a 
change  of  linen."  Mr.  Britling  "  pointed  all  too 
plainly  at  America."  "  There's  two  sorts  of  liberal- 

[  129  ] 


ism  —  there's  the  liberalism  of  great  aims  and  the 
liberalism  of  defective  moral  energy." 

Mr.  Wells's  American,  Mr.  Direck,  is  not  en- 
tirely successful.  He  accords  with  the  British  con- 
vention by  which  Americans  are  all  rather  like 
Gerald  Stanley  Lee,  and  is  full  of  points  about 
America  —  points  that  don't  tickle  one's  gizzard  as 
hard  as  such  hard  points  ought  to.  But  there  is 
delicious  sympathetic  chronicle  of  Mr.  Direck  in 
love.  "  Mr.  Direck's  mood  was  an  immense  so- 
lemnity, like  a  dark  ocean  beneath  the  vast  dome  of 
the  sky,  and  something  quivered  in  every  fibre  of  his 
being,  like  moonlit  ripples  on  the  sea." 

It  is  convenient  to  believe  you  love  just  once.  It 
is  attractive  to  sentimentalize  about  youth,  once  it  is 
over.  It  is  natural  to  put  down  harassing  "  cosmic 
solicitudes "  as  "  the  last  penalties  of  irreligion." 
These  are  possible  weaknesses  in  the  philosophy 
adumbrated  in  Mr.  Britling.  But  a  finer  use  has 
never  been  made  by  Mr.  Wells  of  his  great  faculty 
for  bringing  his  age  into  focus.  Posterity  alone  can 
judge  whether  Mr.  Wells  pickles  experience  so 
quickly  that  it  cannot  be  expected  to  remain  pickled. 
Certainly  the  process  is  to  the  advantage  of  the 
present  reader.  And  it  is  to  the  honor  of  an  Eng- 
land still  engaged  in  war. 

October  T,  1916. 


[  130] 


MR.  WELLS  ESPOUSES  GOD: 

THE   SOUL   OF   A   BISHOP 

JVlR.  WELLS  has  made  a  supreme  effort  to  trans- 
late through  this  bishop  of  his  a  genuine  religious 
upheaval.  As  befits  his  own  recent  avowal  of  reli- 
gious conviction,  his  bishop  is  not  taken  satirically 
or  egregiously.  He  is  a  regular  English  bishop 
thought  out  and  felt  out,  one  with  a  ring  and  purple 
episcopal  pyjamas,  with  five  daughters  and  Lady 
Ella,  a  bishop  who  sneaks  off  with  his  neurasthenia 
to  the  twilight  garden  to  smoke  a  forbidden  ciga- 
rette —  true  churchman  thick  with  idiosyncrasy  and! 
rich  with  local  color  who  is  the  very  bull's  eye  of 
that  orthodoxy  which  Mr.  Wells  is  out  to  hit. 

It  is  a  fascinating  performance.  Scrope  is  prob- 
ably the  most  elaborate  extra-personal  characteriza- 
tion in  Mr.  Wells's  highly  personal  fiction.  But 
documented  and  authenticated  as  the  man  is,  there 
is  a  thinness  about  his  spirit  that  is  ghostly,  and  the 
emphasis  on  God  in  him  is  like  the  ardent  clasping 
at  a  wraith.  He  is  insubstantial  in  humanity,  prin- 
cipally because  the  substance  of  the  novel  —  the  es- 
cape from  the  torpor  of  the  established  church  to  a 
personal  non-institutional  God  —  is  the  product  of  a 
mind  that  in  critical  vigor  appears  to  be  at  ebb-tide. 

In  one  aspect  the  agility  of  Mr.  Wells  is  astound- 
ing, his  receptivity  is  a  bewilderment.  He  has  an 

The  Soul  of  a  Bishop,  by  H.  G.  Wells.     Macmillan,  New  York. 


extensiveness  of  experience,  and  a  nimbleness  of 
mind  to  accompany  that  extensiveness,  that  makes 
the  ordinary  human  being  feel  like  a  lump  of  clay. 
Where  you  or  I  would  hesitate  out  of  that  caution, 
which  is  partly  calculation,  partly  habit,  partly  con- 
sistency, Mr.  Wells  plunges  in  with  a  whoop  and  a 
flourish,  and  then,  free  in  a  new  milieu,  procures 
whatever  justification  is  to  be  had.  Whether  it  is 
God  that  his  hero  is  embracing,  or  only  a  mistress, 
there  is  the  same  precipitation,  the  same  ratification 
later  on.  For  always  Mr.  Wells  has  the  same  mas- 
terly opinionativeness.  A  born  pamphleteer,  he  has 
the  most  effective  of  all  the  persuasions  that  go  to 
make  partisanship  dangerous  —  he  is  convinced  that 
beyond  everything  else  he  is  intellectually  honest  and 
hard  and  clear.  On  his  lips  there  is  the  shibboleth 
"modern,"  as  if  fashion  were  a  clew  to  Tightness; 
and,  conceiving  the  larger  part  of  sincerity  to  be 
obedience  to  immediate  conviction,  Mr.  Wells  is 
never  at  a  loss  for  sincerity  because  convictions  are 
his  stock  in  trade. 

But  in  some  matters,  particularly  in  this  matter 
of  religion,  one  questions  the  attitude  of  a  writer 
who  develops  strong  convictions  too  readily.  There 
is  too  much  about  the  architecture  of  Mr.  Wells's 
convictions  that  reminds  one  of  the  bright  expediency 
of  a  World's  Fair.  He  produces  his  palaces  over- 
night. They  cometh  up  as  the  flowers.  They  glis- 
ten in  fresh  splendor  in  the  face  of  a  gratified  sun. 
But  they  have  no  sewerage.  They  are  not  rain- 
proof. They  stand  wind  and  weather  very  badly. 
And  as  soon  as  the  particular  show  for  which  they 
were  erected  is  over,  they  have  to  be  blown  up  with 
dynamite  and  cleared  away.  A  quickness  in  arriv- 

[  132] 


ing  at  convictions  is  an  admirable  thing.  It  is  indis- 
pensable to  men  of  action.  But  the  sense  of  respon- 
sibility that  keeps  a  man  of  thought  from  simulating 
the  effectiveness  of  a  man  of  action  is  not  all  con- 
servatism, not  all  academic  pokiness.  Part  of  it  is 
a  realization  that  in  the  realm  of  ideas  the  premium 
ought  to  be  put  on  genuine  sincerity  —  not  merely 
the  utterance  of  conviction  but  the  testing  of  it,  the 
contract  carried  out  as  well  as  the  contract  rosily 
signed. 

In  regard  to  sex  we  now  know  precisely  how  Mr. 
Wells  feels  about  untested  relationships.  "  Only 
after  years  can  one  be  sure  of  it ";  he  says  of  quasi- 
sacramental  union,  "  it  is  not  brought  about  by  vows 
and  promises  but  by  an  essential  kindred  and  cleav- 
ing of  body  and  spirit."  And  again,  "  It  is  difficult 
to  imagine  how  the  association  of  lovers  and  friends 
can  be  very  fine  and  close  and  good  unless  the  two 
who  love  are  each  also  linked  to  God,  so  that  through 
their  moods  and  fluctuations  and  the  changes  of 
years  they  can  be  held  steadfast  by  his  undying  stead- 
fastness." Yet  this  argument  as  to  the  validity  of 
conviction  is  the  last  one  proposed  or  encountered  in 
the  flop  that  Mr.  Wells  makes  into  religion.  He 
just  flops,  and  no  sooner  does  he  attain  religious  be- 
liefs than  he  declares  them,  and  no  sooner  does  he 
declare  them  in  a  short  treatise  on  God  than  he  pro- 
duces a  novel  dramatizing  these  beliefs  in  the  history 
of  a  personality.  It  is  not  a  new  process  with  him. 
Every  great  experience  of  his  life  has  induced  a  con- 
vulsion in  his  ideas,  and  every  convulsion  a  drama- 
tization. This  does  not  mean  that  he  is  slavishly 
autobiographical.  It  simply  means  that,  conven- 
iently enough,  Mr.  Wells  is  a  thinker  in  relation  to 

[  133  ] 


his  expericncings,  and  that  it  satisfies  him  to  embody 
in  a  story  the  immediate  reality  that  has  suddenly, 
oh  so  suddenly,  dawned  on  him. 

The  Soul  of  a  Bishop  should,  of  course,  be  read 
first  of  all  as  a  story — for  its  development  of  a 
distinctive  character.  The  man  who  writes  the  novel 
is  still  the  Mr.  Wells  who  reads  newspapers  omniv- 
orously  and  whose  swarming,  inchoate,  multi-na- 
tional world  is  largely  the  world  of  jostling  head- 
lines and  competitive  news.  But  in  spite  of  the 
"  vision  "  that  serves  to  shake  out  these  divers  pep- 
per-pot allusions,  the  story  is  much  more  concen- 
trated and  unified  than  usual,  the  theme  being  the 
bishop's  struggle  through  the  debility  of  impossible 
compromises  to  an  understanding  that  "  man's  true 
environment  is  God."  Much  of  that  struggle  is  an 
adaptation  of  God  the  Invisible  King.  The  religion 
at  which  the  ex-bishop  arrives  is  the  religion  at  which 
Mr.  Wells  arrived  a  little  previously,  only  the  course 
that  the  bishop  takes  is  suggestive  of  every  dubious 
element  in  contemporary  sacerdotalism.  The  theme 
is  handled  by  Mr.  Wells  like  a  virtuoso.  It  gives 
him  a  chance  to  open  out  the  heart  of  the  episcopate, 
to  show  the  silliness  that  masquerades  in  perfumed 
religiosity,  the  amusing  and  contemptible  compro- 
mises of  a  monarchical  church.  It  also  allows  him 
to  dramatize  conversion  in  a  series  of  magnificent 
visions  induced  by  a  strange  medicine,  in  which  there 
is  actually  a  touch  of  ecstasy.  An  angel  appears, 
"  a  figure  of  great  strength  and  beauty,  with  a  smil- 
ing face  and  kindly  eyes,"  and  the  bishop  has  the 
courage  to  speak  to  him. 

"  I  want,"  he  said,  "  to  know  about  God. 

"  I  want,"  he  said,  with  a  deepening  passion  of  the  soul, 

[  134] 


"  to  know  about  God.  Slowly  through  four  years  I  have 
been  awakening  to  the  need  of  God.  Body  and  soul  I  am 
sick  for  the  want  of  God  and  the  knowledge  of  God.  I  did 
not  know  what  was  the  matter  with  me,  why  my  life  had 
become  so  disordered  and  confused  that  my  very  appetites 
and  habits  are  all  astray.  But  I  am  perishing  for  God  as  a 
waterless  man  upon  a  raft  perishes  for  drink,  and  there  is 
nothing  but  madness  if  I  touch  the  seas  about  me.  Not 
only  in  my  thoughts  but  in  my  under  thoughts  and  in  my 
nerves  and  bones  and  arteries  I  have  need  of  God.  You 
see  I  grew  up  in  the  delusion  that  I  knew  God.  I  did  not 
know  that  I  was  unprovisioned  and  unprovided  against  the 
tests  and  strains  and  hardships  of  life.  I  thought  that  I 
was  secure  and  safe." 

It  is  the  church,  the  creed,  that  have  estranged  him 
from  his  religion,  made  him  throw  out  the  Savior 
with  the  orthodoxy. 

"And  the  truth?"  said  the  bishop  in  an  eager  whisper. 
"  You  can  tell  me  the  truth." 

The  Angel's  answer  was  a  gross  familiarity.  He  thrust 
his  hand  through  the  bishop's  hair  and  ruffled  it  affection- 
ately, and  rested  for  a  moment  holding  the  bishop's  cranium 
in  his  great  palm. 

"But  can  this  hold  it?"  he  said. 

"  Not  with  this  little  box  of  brains,"  said  the  Angel. 
"  You  could  as  soon  make  a  meal  of  the  stars  and  pack  them 
into  your  belly.  You  haven't  the  things  to  do  it  with  inside 
this" 

He  gave  the  bishop's  head  a  little  shake  and  relinquished  it. 

He  began  to  argue  as  an  elder  brother  might. 

"  Isn't  it  enough  for  you  to  know  something  of  the  God 
that  comes  down  to  the  human  scale,  who  has  been  born  on 
your  planet  and  arisen  out  of  Man,  who  is  Man  and  God, 
your  leader?  He's  more  than  enough  to  fill  your  mind  and 
use  up  every  faculty  of  your  being.  He  is  courage,  he  is 

[  135  ] 


adventure,  he  is  the  King,  he  fights  for  you  and  with  you 
against  death." 

"  And  he  is  not  infinite?  He  is  not  the  Creator?  "  asked 
the  bishop. 

"  So  far  as  you  are  concerned,  no,"  said  the  Angel. 

"  So  far  as  I  am  concerned  ?  " 

"  What  have  you  to  do  with  creation?  " 

Which  is  quite  a  retort,  but  if  "  this  little  box  of 
brains  "  is  incompetent,  then  why  isn't  God  a  Cre- 
ator and  why  isn't  the  creed  everything  the  bishops 
say  it  is?  If  one  is  going  to  surrender  one's  intelli- 
gence, why  not  to  a  Pope  or  to  the  dictator  of  a 
creed? 

"  Our  country  is  at  war  and  half  mankind  is  at  war ; 
death  and  destruction  trample  through  the  world;  men  rot 
and  die  by  the  million,  food  diminishes  and  fails,  there  is  a 
wasting  away  of  all  the  hoarded  resources,  of  all  the  accumu- 
lated well-being  of  mankind;  and  there  is  no  clear  prospect 
yet  of  any  end  to  this  enormous  and  frightful  conflict.  Why 
did  it  ever  arise?  What  made  it  possible?  It  arose  be- 
cause men  had  forgotten  God.  It  was  possible  because  they 
worshiped  simulacra,  were  loyal  to  phantoms  of  race  and 
empire,  permitted  themselves  to  be  ruled  and  misled  by  idiot 
princes  and  usurper  kings.  Their  minds  were  turned  from 
God,  who  alone  can  rule  and  unite  mankind,  and  so  they 
have  passed  from  the  glare  and  follies  of  those  former  years 
into  the  darkness  and  anguish  of  the  present  day." 

It  is  easy  to  imagine  that  thousands  of  people 
will  like  the  tenor  of  this  sermon  by  the  bishop. 
With  its  ample  answer  to  poignant  questioning  Mr. 
Wells  will  reach  the  layer  of  readers  that  used  to  be 
Harold  Bell  Wright's,  Marie  Corelli's,  and  perhaps 
Hall  Caine's.  But  it  will  be  for  the  solace  in  his 
words,  not  their  exemplification  of  a  bishop's  intellL- 


rgence,  that  these  passages  will  most  be  appreciated. 
No  one  writing  in  English  today  compares  with 
H.  G.  Wells  as  a  novelist  of  ideas.  As  a  story- 
teller he  is  extraordinarily  vibrant  and  effective,  and 
he  can  no  more  get  on  without  conclusive  ideas  in  a 
fresh  situation  than  a  man  can  get  on  without  a  skin. 
But  in  this  instance,  for  the  proper  enjoyment  of 
The  Soul  of  a  Bishop,  it  is  necessary  to  differentiate 
between  the  book's  contribution  to  ideas  and  its  con- 
tribution to  art.  The  bishop  is  a  bleak  creature, 
largely  because  Mr.  Wells  invented  him  to  fulfill  a 
fictional  purpose.  Characterized  with  amazing 
cleverness,  he  is  still  essentially  a  bobbin  on  whom 
the  religious  thread  is  wound.  The  cordiality,  the 
rushing  sympathy  and  kindness  and  fellowship  that 
religious  men  in  Russian  novels  express  in  every  re- 
lation, have  no  place  in  this  egoist's  religious  escape 
from  neurasthenia.  The  bishop  is  sincere  in  seek- 
ing an  explanation  of  the  universe,  but  it  is  an  ex- 
planation that  is  to  give  courage  and  youth  and  ad- 
venture, the  attributes  of  the  self-concerned  man. 
Moving  from  this  to  the  ideas  that  the  book  pre- 
sents, there  is  a  frank  wonder  on  my  own  part  that 
Mr.  Wells  can  take  with  such  seriousness  so  mon- 
archical and  regimental  a  God.  For  a  man  who 
has  always  had  a  goading  ideal  of  self-discipline  this 
is  a  natural  enough  God  to  manufacture,  eminently 
a  God  of  service  and  efficiency,  but  he  is  a  curiously 
local  and  immediate  and  personal  evocation,  heavily 
mortgaged  to  the  present  kind  of  world.  If  one  is 
going  to  have  a  God,  why  not  step  outside  the  dio- 
cesan habits  of  mankind?  What  led  Mr.  Wells  to 
suppose  that  contemporary  religion  has  anything 
whatever  to  say  about  the  purposes  or  destinies  of 

[  137  ] 


mankind?  In  his  vertical  ascent  in  English  society 
Mr.  Wells  has  come  unprepared  on  the  establish- 
ment of  bishops.  He  has  given  the  idea  of  them 
too  much  significance.  Whatever  way  the  meaning 
of  life  lies,  it  probably  does  not  lie  God-ward,  and 
it  is  difficult  to  be  entirely  respectful  of  Mr.  Wells's 
latest  impetuous  and  incontinent  adventure. 

September  22,  1917. 


THE  OLD  WIVES'  TALE 

with  simple  expectancy  does  one  come  to  The 
Old  Wives'  Tale.  Mr.  Robertson  Nicoll  has  pro- 
nounced it  a  really  great  novel.  Max  Beerbohm, 
whose  taste  is  catholic  but  certainly  not  crass,  has 
called  it  a  masterpiece.  Such  praise  from  the  dis- 
criminate stirs  one's  blood.  A  great  novel  I  A 
masterpiece  I  The  writer  who  says  "  masterpiece  " 
has  uttered  the  carissima  of  his  profession.  It  is 
the  Almighty  and  Everlasting  of  criticism.  He  can 
no  more.  And  men  like  Max  Beerbohm,  who  have 
honor  as  critics,  wind  an  inviting  horn  when  they 
proclaim  a  novel  great. 

Mr.  Bennett's  novel  justifies  its  critics.  On  con- 
ventional grounds  the  book  is  impressive.  It  has 
dimension,  size,  solidity.  Modern  in  temper,  it  is 
neither  flashy  nor  flimsy  in  material.  But  what  are 
the  heavy  battalions  without  their  Napoleon?  The 
detail  and  circumstance  of  this  novel  would  mean 
nothing  if  it  didn't  move,  honest  and  self-possessed, 
on  springs  of  wise  invention. 

The  Old  Wives'  Tale  is  a  novel  of  many  parts, 
many  distinctions,  of  which  the  chief  distinction  is, 
not  its  delightful  length  nor  its  originality  of  sub-. 
ject,  but  its  general  spirit,  its  superb  common  sense, 
In  fiction  it  is  usual  for  the  writer  to  pretend  to  the 
reader  that  life  is  a  very  wonderful,  very  extraordi- 
nary affair,  made  up  of  the  most  surprising  adven- 

The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  by  Arnold  Bennett.    Doran,  New 
[  139  ] 


tures  and  the  most  punctual  and  terrific  emotions. 
It  is  easy  to  draw  to  this  Brobdignagian  scale  which 
no  one  can  correct,  and  very  hard  to  draw  to  the 
scale  of  normal  and  familiar  man,  which  any  one 
can  correct.  Hence  common  sense,  "  our  gold 
crushed  out  of  joy  and  pain,"  is  the  rarest  as  it  is 
the  most  valuable  quality  in  imaginative  writing. 

To  achieve  this  beautiful  realism,  which  is  a  vision 
of  life  conditioned  to  actual  needs,  is  not  to  produce 
the  crapulous  or  the  banal.  It  is  the  sentimentalist 
who  is  afraid  that  if  one  rings  at  truth's  door  one  will 
bring  out  a  corrupt  and  leering  monster.  He  alone 
is  certain  of  natural  viciousness,  and  hides  his  own 
nature  in  the  darkness  of  night;  his  scampering  heart 
taking  for  the  pitfall  what  in  daylight  is  the  neces- 
sary drain.  The  realist,  as  seen  in  Mr.  Bennett,  is 
one  whom  irony  and  sympathy  alike  remove  from 
the  sentimentalist  —  supposing  sentimentalism  to 
imply  the  effemination  of  the  soul,  "  the  absence  both 
of  clear  reason,  and  also  of  the  one  other  thing,  be- 
sides religion  and  country,  that  the  comic  spirit  re- 
spects, simple  and  healthy  passion." 

Adopting  the  old  method,  accepting  the  human 
career  as  a  complete  drama  in  itself,  a  drama  of 
which  the  laws  are  inscrutable,  Mr.  Bennett  has  told 
without  digression  the  story  of  Constance  and 
Sophia,  daughters  of  an  English  provincial  draper. 
With  single  purpose,  he  has  kept  to  the  bourgeoisie, 
from  the  sixties  to  the  nineties.  The  accidents  of 
life  divert  Sophia  to  Paris,  but  she  stays  in  her  class, 
and  in  her  era,  and  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  remains 
a  unified  picture  of  the  kin  to  which  most  of  us  be- 
long, with  limited  romance  of  achievement,  and  un- 
limited possibility  of  soul. 


It  is  because  he  perceives  and  values  these  oppor- 
tunities of  the  soul  that  Mr.  Bennett  writes  of 
drapers  and  confectioners  from  no  absurd  distance. 
Drapers  also  are  made  in  the  image  of  God.  The 
human  comedy,  with  certain  ludicrous  interludes,  and 
a  desperate  cruelty  to  the  pious  and  the  sentimental, 
goes  on  with  no  great  peculiarities  of  mood  among 
the  Baineses,  the  Poveys,  the  Scaleses,  Aunt  Har- 
riet and  Aunt  Maria,  Maggie  and  Maud. 

It  is  through  Sophia  and  Constance  that  this 
drama,  after  a  slow  preliminary,  is  enacted  in  all 
those  abrupt  and  apparently  haphazard  chapters 
dictated  by  the  passions  and  the  catastrophes  of  com- 
mon life. 

Constance  is  pliant,  amiable,  sensible,  and  her  fate 
inevitably  leads  her  to  "  fall  in  love  "  with  Samuel 
Povey,  the  youngish  man  on  whose  shoulders  fall 
many  of  the  duties  relinquished  by  her  bed-ridden 
father.  Sophia,  in  contrast,  is  vivacious,  proud, 
high-spirited,  willful.  She  is  a  trial  to  her  sagacious 
mother,  and  family  conflicts  are  many.  The  moth- 
er's wisdom  is  an  unfailing  irritant.  "  She  had 
prophesied  a  cold  for  Sophia,  the  refuser  of  castor 
oil,  and  it  had  come." 

After  some  years  of  imperfect  understanding  at 
home,  Sophia  captivates  an  attractive  young  "  drum- 
mer." She  loses  her  heart.  He  proposes  elope- 
ment. She  goes  to  London.  The  interview  in 
which  he  tries  to  evade  the  question  of  marriage  is 
marvelous  sexual  analysis,  with  mingled  exaltation, 
wile  and  sensuality.  Gerald  Scales  marries  Sophia. 
With  his  supposedly  vast  fortune  of  12,000  dollars, 
they  go  to  Paris.  Sophia  painfully  learns,  what  she 
"  might  have  divined  from  that  adorable  half-femi- 


nine  smile,  that  she  could  do  anything  with  Gerald 
except  rely  on  him."  When  they  come  to  hate  each 
other,  she  is  too  proud  to  write  home.  "  She  was 
ready  to  pay  the  price  of  pride  and  of  a  moment's 
imbecility  with  a  lifetime  of  self-repression." 

At  last,  after  four  spendthrift  years,  Gerald  de- 
serts her.  She  passes  through  poverty  and  disease. 
Her  will  hardens  to  steel.  Love  knocks  at  the  door 
but  her  instinct  rebels. 

"  She  knew  that  she  wanted  love.  Only  she  con- 
ceived a  different  kind  of  love:  placid,  regular, 
somewhat  stern,  somewhat  above  the  plane  of 
whims,  moods,  caresses,  and  all  mere  fleshly  con- 
tacts. Not  that  she  considered  that  she  despised 
these  things  (though  she  did)  !  What  she  wanted 
was  a  love  too  proud,  too  independent,  to  exhibit 
frankly  either  its  joy  or  its  pain.  She  hated  a  dis- 
play of  sentiment.  And  even  in  the  most  intimate 
abandonments  she  would  have  safe  reserves,  and 
would  have  expected  reserves,  trusting  to  a  lover's 
powers  of  divination,  and  to  her  own !  The  founda- 
tion of  her  character  was  a  haughty  moral  independ- 
ence, and  this  quality  was  what  she  most  admired 
in  others." 

While  Sophia  is  becoming  the  hard  managerial 
boarding-house  keeper,  Constance  is  experiencing  in 
her  person  the  history  of  her  kind.  In  The  Old 
Wives'  Tale  babies  are  never  found  under  a  goose- 
berry bush.  Constance's  confinement  is  described  as 
befits  so  supreme  and  solemn  an  event.  Cyril  is  the 
fruit  of  her  union.  Cyril  gives  a  tea  party  when  he 
is  four  and  misbehaves  dreadfully.  Cyril  goes  to 
school.  Cyril  steals  a  florin  out  of  the  till.  Many 
and  brilliant  are  the  adventures  of  Cyril.  But  they 


are  all  swallowed  up,  like  a  toyshop  in  an  earth- 
quake, when  Cyril's  middle-aged  cousin  kills  his 
drunkard  wife  by  accident. 

The  law  lays  grim  hand  on  Daniel.  Samuel 
Povey,  who  looks  up  to  this  cousin,  makes  his  cause 
his  own.  He  engages  the  barrister,  gets  up  a  pe- 
tition, excites  the  community,  neglects  his  business, 
his  health.  The  law,  with  curious  indifference  to 
the  terrible  emotions  of  Samuel,  hangs  Daniel  Povey. 
Samuel  contracts  pneumonia.  "  He  survived  the 
crisis  of  the  disease  and  then  died  of  toxaemia, 
caused  by  a  heart  which  would  not  do  its  duty  by  the 
blood."  There  is  virtuosity  for  you !  "  A  casual 
death,  scarce  noticed  in  the  reaction  after  the  great 
febrile  demonstration!  Besides  Samuel  Povey 
never  could  impose  himself  on  the  burgesses.  He 
lacked  individuality.  He  was  little.  I  have  often 
laughed  at  Samuel  Povey.  But  I  liked  and  respected 
him.  He  was  a  very  honest  man.  I  have  always 
been  glad  to  think  that,  at  the  end  of  his  life,  des- 
tiny took  hold  of  him  and  displayed,  to  the  observant, 
the  vein  of  greatness  which  runs  through  every  soul 
without  exception.  He  embraced  a  cause,  lost  it, 
and  died  of  it." 

Constance,  the  widow,  fails  to  hold  Cyril,  who 
has  hankerings  after  art.  But  her  life  takes  on  a 
new  complexion  when  a  clew  to  the  vanished  Sophia 
is  discovered  and  when  Sophia  herself,  pulled  down 
in  health,  eventually  returns  to  Bursley. 

The  two  sisters,  after  diverse  experiences,  find 
themselves  together  at  fifty.  In  Sophia  the  ferment 
of  life  is  still  active.  She  has  "  outgrown  "  Bursley. 
She  tries  in  vain  to  induce  Constance,  who  is  com- 
fortably off,  to  move.  "  It  was  scarcely  conceivable 
E  H3  ] 


that  they  should  be  living  in  the  very  middle  of  a 
dirty,  ugly,  industrial  town  because  Constance 
mulishly  declined  to  move."  But  Constance  is  set 
in  her  ways.  Sophia  inflicts  changes,  dismisses  the 
old  servant,  fights  the  dirt,  yet  on  the  whole  is  a 
comfort,  if  not  a  spiritual  companion  to  her  sister. 
Then  when  Sophia  is  sixty,  Gerald  Scales  is  an- 
nounced to  be  in  Manchester,  dangerously  ill. 
Sophia  goes,  teeth  set  for  the  encounter,  but  there  is 
no  occasion.  Gerald  is  dead  before  she  arrives. 
She  sees  him.  She  had  not  pictured  him  old.  She 
beholds  him  dead,  and  it  moves  her  to  the  core : 

What  affected  her  was  that  he  had  once  been  young,  and 
that  he  had  grown  old,  and  was  now  dead.  That  was  all. 
Youth  and  vigor  had  come  to  that.  Youth  and  vigor  al- 
ways came  to  that.  He  had  ill  treated  her;  he  had  aban- 
doned her;  he  had  been  a  devious  rascal;  but  how  trivial 
were  such  accusations  against  him!  The  whole  of  her  huge 
and  bitter  grievance  against  him  fell  to  pieces  and  crumbled. 
She  saw  him  young,  and  proud,  and  strong,  as  for  instance 
when  he  had  kissed  her  lying  on  the  bed  in  that  London 
hotel  —  she  forgot  the  name  —  in  1 866 ;  and  now  he  was 
old,  and  worn,  and  horrible,  and  dead. 

That  is  the  end  of  Sophia.  The  strain  of  her 
silent  interview  is  too  great.  And  after  her  death, 
the  tragedy  of  her  career,  passionate,  eager,  master- 
ful and  futile,  fills  with  pity  that  placid  woman  Con- 
stance, whose  end  comes  tranquilly,  after  years  of 
sciatica,  borne  with  much  forbearance. 

It  is  Mr.  Bennett's  triumph  that  he  has  given  in 
the  most  loving  and  delicious  detail  the  plain  story 
of  these  plain  lives,  and  sacrificed  neither  the  ro- 
mance implicit  in  every  human  story  nor  the  implicit 
philosophy  which  is  the  gist  of  such  story  repeated. 

[  144  ] 


Not  that  a  novel  should  directly  be  "  a  light  to 
guide,  a  rod  to  check  the  erring  and  reprove."  But 
to  give  one  a  sensation  is  not  enough.  Literature 
which  treats  of  death  and  birth,  passion  and  pain, 
must  confront  these  mysteries  morally  as  well  as 
artistically.  It  is  the  moral  atmosphere  of  The  Old 
Wives'  Tale  that  makes  it  great.  I  am  afraid  that 
Mr.  Bennett  is  somewhat  jovial  about  God.  But 
it  is  the  God  that  is  preceded  by  a  cross  breakfast 
and  followed  by  a  Gargantuan  Sunday  dinner,  the 
Staffordshire  Jehovah,  that  Mr.  Bennett  is  pleasantly 
jovial  about.  Concerning  the  instinct  that  puts  some- 
thing above  pleasure,  Mr.  Bennett  is  serious.  It  is 
not  to  the  intoxication  of  ideas  or  to  the  "  ruthless 
egoism  of  happiness  "  that  he  yields  himself  finally. 
He  admires  the  Sr^rtan  virtues,  the  severe  Spartan 
joys. 

Yet  however  he  may  admire  tenacity  of  ideal  and 
power  of  will,  he  is  no  dogmatist.  And  he  laughs 
at  every  one  of  his  creatures  in  turn,  at  their  silly 
sense  that  their  toothache,  their  ache  of  childbirth, 
is  the  most  important,  most  terrible  ache  in  the 
world  —  at  the  mother  who  has  the  bitterness  of 
age  against  uncompromising  youth  which  expects  to 
consummate  its  vague  dreams  and  grudges  to  find 
things  "  so  obstinately,  so  incurably  unsentimental." 

It  is  this  moral  atmosphere  that  gives  the  novel 
its  advantage  over  a  work  of  such  meticulous  real- 
ism as  Esther  Waters.  George  Moore  observed 
Esther  Waters.  Arnold  Bennett  experienced  So- 
phia Baines.  So  he  experienced  Constance,  and  so 
Samuel  Povey.  And  for  that  reason  he  has  forgot- 
ten nothing,  neither  the  ancestral  bed  nor  the  bad 
Landseer  copy,  nor  the  dark  kitchen  alley,  in  the 

[  145  ] 


Bursley  background.  When  Mr.  Bennett  gives  yon 
these  things  he  is  giving  you  the  idiom  of  his  life. 
When  George  Moore  gives  you  these  things  he  is 
giving  you  the  idiom  of  Zola's  life. 

Mr.  Bennett's  style  is  clear  and  unaffected.  It 
has  "  a  modesty  so  proud  that  it  scorns  ostentation." 
Sedate  but  vivacious  in  ordinary  narrative,  it  is  best 
in  the  crucial  scenes  where  simplicity  and  vigor  are 
effective.  Mr.  Bennett's  knowledge  of  his  charac- 
ters is  inexhaustible.  Moreover,  one  is  certain  he 
has  come  to  see  life  for  himself,  though  he  never 
sacrifices  his  story  to  the  pleasure  of  orienting  him- 
self. 

Most  delightful  are  the  engrossing  fictional  uses 
he  has  found  for  workaday  life  and  bourgeois  vir- 
tue. With  all  his  realization  of  facts,  known  to  the 
angelic  as  sordid,  he  is  at  heart  gay,  not  for  an  in- 
stant acrid.  If  he  is  never  rapt,  never  exalted, 
never  conscious  of  any  but  the  moral  divinity  in  man, 
it  is  because  Bursley  is  not  Dionysiac.  There  is  no 
glamour  in  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  no  illusion. 

Again  Bursley  is  to  blame.  For  Bursley  is  bour- 
geois life,  the  life  which  bakes  bread,  and  scrubs 
floors,  and  backs  bills,  and  bears  children,  and  is  not 
vain  enough,  or  mad  enough,  or  brain  enough  to  ask 
for  the  answer  to  the  riddle. 

August  27,  igog. 


CLAYHANGER 

WHEN  Mr.  Bennett  did  The  Old  Wives'  Tale 
people  sagely  accepted  it  as  his  peak  performance. 
Hugo  and  The  Statue  and  other  novels  written  in 
bland  compromise  encouraged  this  judgment.  Every 
man  is  supposed  to  contain  "  one  great  novel,"  and 
it  was  easy  to  believe  that  Mr.  Bennett  had  shot  his 
bolt.  For  evidence,  one  took  his  own  words,  his 
easy  deprecations,  his  glib  manner  in  The  Truth 
About  an  Author.  But  one  reckoned  without  one's 
Englishman.  In  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  Mr.  Ben- 
nett was  cautiously  feeling  his  way.  He  was  ven- 
turing his  surplus  knowledge  of  life  before  he  would 
let  the  public  into  his  fastnesses.  Now,  in  Clay- 
hanger,  this  extraordinary  man  has  firmly  guided  his 
readers  again  through  a  wonderful  series  of  events, 
events  to  which  every  man  is  born  heir,  but  of  which 
few  are  consciously  and  fully  proprietorial.  He  has 
brought  us  through  the  catastrophe  of  death,  the 
catastrophe  of  birth,  the  catastrophe  of  marriage. 
He  has  taken  glossed  and  threadbare  facts,  facts 
which  the  youngest  child  knows  by  names,  facts  to 
which  time  and  usage  have  made  us  callous.  In  these 
facts,  exhibited  in  the  life  of  a  young  Staffordshire 
tradesman,  Mr.  Bennett  has  again  discovered  ro- 
mance. Under  the  crust  he  has  shown  the  hard  and 
precious  metal  of  which  real  life  is  made.  Not  by  a 
device  of  emphasizing  Motherhood  and  The  Present 

Clayhanger,  by  Arnold  Bennett.     Dutton,  New  York. 
[    147   ] 


System,  Little  Babies  and  the  Demon  Rum  has  he 
aroused  us  fundamentally.  He  does  it  by  an  ex- 
position at  once  patient  and  playful.  He  does  it  by 
a  consideration  in  which  nothing  is  shirked,  by  a 
method  studiously  restrained  and  unexcited.  He 
wins  by  the  sheer  valuableness  of  his  tale,  by  its  in- 
clusive understanding,  by  its  integrity. 

In  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  Mr.  Bennett  attempted 
less  than  in  Clayhanger,  for  in  the  former  he  re- 
served judgment.  The  book  was  a  triumph,  but  it 
was  a  triumph  in  which  there  were  still  several 
layers  of  humanity  unmined.  He  went  deep,  but 
not  as  deep  as  in  Clayhanger.  For  here  he  is  almost 
totally  occupied  with  the  secret  life  of  Edwin,  with 
that  fearful  and  wonderful  labor  of  personal  adjust- 
ment of  which  so  little  is  usually  suspected  or  under- 
stood. 

There  are  people  who  say  that  human  nature  is 
the  same  the  world  over,  etc.  To  my  mind  the  great 
interest  in  Arnold  Bennett's  novel  Clayhanger  is  its 
demonstration  that  Staffordshire  nature  has  its  own 
rare  peculiarities,  peculiarities  to  which  this  novelist 
is  all  the  more  true  because  he  is  proud  of  them  and 
invincibly  sure  that  they  are  the  best  qualities  in  life. 
The  issues  of  Clayhanger  are  indeed  issues  the  world 
over.  They  are  the  issues  of  life  and  death.  But 
great  novelists  all  take  these  issues  in  their  own  way, 
and  the  way  of  Arnold  Bennett  is  stubbornly  original. 

Arnold  Bennett  is  preeminently  sane.  Sanity  is 
almost  his  fetish.  He  is  possessed  of  a  taut,  intel- 
lectual honesty,  and  a  resolute  will  to  reason.  I 
imagine  that  this  is  a  Bursley  specialty.  It  is  not 
so  much  a  natural,  cold-blooded  affinity  for  science 
as  a  hatred  of  nonsense  and  sentimentality.  The 


English  are  almost  invariably  a  people  of  prejudice : 
a  people  of  faith,  sentiment  and  romance.  But  in 
this  son  of  Staffordshire  there  is  combined  with  faith, 
tenderness  and  romance  a  hatred  of  heroics,  a  hatred 
of  facile  emotion,  a  hatred  of  insincerity  in  any 
form  —  in  short,  a  love  of  stern  virtue  under  any 
other  name. 

Mr.  Bennett  knows  that  we  usually  lie  because  we 
have  not  courage  of  our  desires  and  of  our  pride. 
We  falsify  rather  than  make  good.  Our  laziness 
and  moral  cowardice  lead  to  shirking,  and  our  pride 
leads  us  into  lying.  Look  how  Mr.  Roosevelt's  fierce 
pride  leads  him  into  constant  lying.  Mr.  Bennett 
knows  this  foible,  and  in  Edwin  he  has  selected  the 
usual  sensitive  man,  the  good-natured  and  rather  ir- 
resolute man  of  medium  vitality,  who  is  born  with  a 
strong  desire  for  perfection,  and  who  does  not  under- 
stand how  to  get  forward.  This  is  Edwin's  specific 
weakness,  and  practically  everyone  who  has  desires 
unfulfilled  and  pride  unratified  is  in  a  position  to  sym- 
pathize with  Edwin. 

Whenever  Edwin  begins  to  falsify,  Mr.  Bennett  is 
present  with  lambent  humor,  and  he  is  steadfast  in 
refusing  to  conventionalize.  Certain  facts  almost 
always  slighted  in  novels  he  is  ready  to  catch :  he 
gives  due  proportion  to  Edwin's  "  black  and  awful 
agony  "  at  Hilda's  first  inexplicable  letter.  And  he 
reaches  a  fine  candor  in  his  description  of  old  Clay- 
hanger's  death  when  he  says  that:  "  Edwin's  distress 
was  shot  through  and  enlightened  by  his  solemn  sat- 
isfaction at  the  fact  that  destiny  had  allotted  to  him, 
Edwin,  an  experience  of  such  profound  and  over- 
whelming grandeur."  It  is  probably  true  that  an- 
other kind  of  man  would  not  have  had  so  clear  a 


consciousness  of  expanded  ego.  To  a  man  less  self- 
conscious  the  thought  would  not  occur  so  readily: 
"  I've  had  a  solemnly  satisfying  experience."  But 
back  of  it  all  is  the  certain  reality  that  the  biggest 
men  want  the  most  consciousness,  the  most  stretch- 
ing and  vivifying  experience.  Whether  the  ego  is 
held  in  that  remarkable  Staffordshire  pride,  reserve 
and  protestantism,  or  merges  in  sympathies  warmer 
and  humbler,  the  primary  egoism  of  life  is  the  same. 
That  law,  known  to  every  candid  individualist,  re- 
ceives many  exemplifications  in  this  novel  of  secret,  or 
one  might  say  secretive  life. 

But  is  there  such  a  thing  to  Bennett,  the  reason- 
able and  apprehensive  Bennett,  as  love?  Certainly 
his  metaphysics  of  love  make  a  rather  grudging  con- 
cession to  the  poetry  of  life.  "  He  had  no  notion 
that  he  was  in  love,"  he  says  of  Edwin,  after  Edwin 
has  been  piqued  by  the  forthright  yet  unaccountable 
and  passionate  Lessways  girl.  "  He  did  not  know 
what  love  was;  he  had  not  had  sufficient  opportunity 
of  learning.  Nevertheless  the  processes  of  love 
were  at  work  within  him.  Silently  and  magically, 
by  the  force  of  desire  and  of  pride,  the  refracting 
glass  was  being  especially  ground  which  would  en- 
able, which  would  compel  him,  to  see  an  ideal 
Hilda  when  he  gazed  at  the  real  Hilda.  He  would 
not  see  the  real  Hilda  any  more  unless  some  cata- 
clysm should  shatter  the  glass."  There  is  no  non- 
sense about  affinities  or  such  in  this  midland  view 
of  love.  But  Mr.  Bennett  does  not  fail  to  see  the 
beauty  of  the  real  Hilda.  And  does  he  not  know, 
doesn't  everyone  know,  that  unless  the  real  Hilda 
could  give  Edwin  the  miracle  of  more  and  more  life 
there  would  be  several  "  cataclysms  "  a  day.  WQ- 

[  150] 


men  have  many  special  and  unpleasant  jobs  to  per- 
form, but  that  their  lovers  must  see  an  "  ideal"  when 
they  gaze  at  the  "  real,"  at  the  risk  of  a  cataclysm, 
presupposes  too  elaborately  sustained  illusion.  The 
love  that  needs  a  magic  refracting  glass  is  not  the 
fine  love  of  which  Bennett  speaks  in  Clayhanger. 

And  on  this  point  of  feeling  it  may  be  said  that 
Bennett  occasionally  has  a  staggering  magnanimity. 
He  can  see  the  eloquence  of  trite  hymns  as  well  as 
the  hideous  vulgarity  of  blood-tub  ones.  He  can  see 
the  heroism  of  mediocre  people,  missed  by  Edwin 
Clayhanger  in  his  cruelty  of  youth,  his  blind  fastidi- 
ousness, his  antagonism  to  natures  less  refined.  He 
can  see,  with  a  special  kindling  vision,  the  beauties 
of  a  manufacturing  town,  the  epic  quality  of  such 
vulgar  things  as  a  Sunday  school  centenary  or  as  the 
solemn  moving  of  a  middle-aged  printer  from  the 
"  shop  "  into  his  new  house.  Mocking  as  he  does 
at  all  that  is  histrionic  and  self-pitying,  Mr.  Bennett 
is  quite  simply  and  gayly  earnest  in  his  celebration 
of  these  common  happenings.  He  loves  the  solidity, 
the  consequence  of  it  all.  He  feels  that  there  is  no 
"  fake  "  about  a  net  profit  of  £339  a  year  in  the  busi- 
ness of  job  printing.  There  may  be  "  victimhood  " 
in  Edwin's  idealizing  of  Hilda.  There  is  no  vic- 
timhood in  Edwin's  taking  £50  from  his  pocket  to 
pay  off  the  bailiff  whom  he  finds  in  possession  of 
Hilda's  house. 

Bennett's  refusal  to  ignore  facts  does  not,  how- 
ever, make  his  prose  prosaic.  If  you  go  all  the 
way  with  Clayhanger  you  will  face  many  unpleasant 
social  realities.  Not  merely  the  cruelties  of  early 
factory  work  in  England,  the  chicane  of  men  in  poli- 
tics and  of  women  in  domestic  warfare;  but  also  the 


rudeness,  self-consciousness,  irresolution  of  human 
beings  not  skilled  in  the  art  of  life.  But  there  is 
nothing  dyspeptic  or  luxurious  in  Mr.  Bennett's  atti- 
tude toward  ugly  fact.  He  is  stoically  blithe  about 
all  these  things  —  not  dancing  on  his  Aurelian  tight- 
rope, but  able  to  smile  containedly. 

Mr.  Bennett  understands  everybody.  It  is  rather 
awe-inspiring  to  have  everybody  and  everything  so 
explained.  And  yet  he  is  much  more  entertaining  in 
manner  than  any  equally  serious  novelist  of  my  ac- 
quaintance. To  deal  with  him  all  at  once  is  a  little 
like  dealing  with  quite  the  most  competent,  decent, 
understanding  yet  unsentimental  dentist  in  the  world. 
We  are  ashamed  to  show  him  that  we  suffer.  We 
heartily  approve  of  his  method.  If  he  is  superior  to 
our  pain,  he  who  understands  it  so  well  and  has  him- 
self been  so  "  porcelained  "  and  "  filled  "  and  "  ex- 
tracted," why  should  we  too  not  be  superior  to  it? 
He  is  not  a  prig.  His  lack  of  sentimentality  is  tonic. 
But  at  times  there  is  a  certain  moral  tension  in  read- 
ing this  novel.  We  would  not  have  the  tension  re- 
duced. We  can  stand  it.  But  we  are  rather  glad 
when  that  excellent  Big  James  comes  on  the  scene, 
one  of  the  few  characters  whom  Mr.  Bennett  ac- 
cepts lovingly  for  his  own  sake.  Then  we  realize 
that  Mr.  Bennett  has  very  little  faculty  for  engaging 
the  reader's  affections  in  his  microcosm.  One's  deep- 
est emotions,  yes.  And  one's  essential  admiration. 
But  not  the  sentiment  that  in  real  life  we  bestow  upon 
people  without  debating  their  worthiness.  There  is 
possibly  more  carelessness,  more  high  spirits  and  ef- 
fervescence in  ordinary  life  than  in  this  rather  tense 
life  of  provincial  England. 

[  152] 


It  is  not  enough,  of  course,  for  a  novelist  to  be 
merely  honest,  merely  philosophic.  Beneath  his  rea- 
son there  must  be  something  else.  Intelligence  is 
wanting  unless  there  is  intelligence  of  the  heart.  To 
be  merely  sane  is  merely  to  be  in  tune  with  the  finite. 
It  is  not  enough  to  observe,  to  enjoy  observing,  to 
have  marvelous  tenacity  of  memory,  lucidity  of  state- 
ment, calm  and  good-natured  catholicity,  judicial 
ease  —  in  a  word,  supreme  sanity.  One  must  also 
do  reverence,  firmly  and  heroically,  to  the  forces 
within  each  of  us,  even  the  least,  that  impel  us  to 
act  without  base  calculation.  In  Mr.  Bennett  cal- 
culativeness  is  fairly  deep.  There  is  always  a  sensi- 
tive apprehension  and  forestallment  of  anti-climax. 
He  watches  for  anti-climax  out  of  the  corner  of  his 
eye.  He  has  no  wish  to  release  himself  in  emotion 
that  may  make  him  ridiculous  in  the  eyes  of  the  criti- 
cal, and  he  is  scarcely  capable  of  that  overwhelming 
sincerity,  that  unrestrained  and  miraculously  certain 
confession  of  self  which  marks  Tolstoy  as  so  great. 
Yet  it  must  be  asserted  that  Arnold  Bennett  is  not 
ultimately  pragmatic  in  the  sense  that  Anthony 
Trollope  was  pragmatic.  In  Bennett  there  is  a  sus- 
pension of  judgment  on  certain  of  his  people  which 
permits  the  affections  to  have  sway.  There  are  oc- 
casions when  reason  is  transcended  and  a  depth  seen 
in  character  and  in  personality  which  is  as  illimitable, 
as  satisfying,  as  the  depths  of  the  sky.  Before  the 
immutable  mysteries,  whether  of  love,  of  intuition, 
of  sex,  of  growth  and  evolution,  of  decay  and  disso- 
lution, this  reasonable  man  is  reasonable  enough  to 
suspend  reason.  He  stands  uncovered  and  un- 
ashamed, no  longer  the  ringmaster  of  bourgeoisie 

[  153  ] 


easy  to  explain  and  to  ridicule,  but  the  artist  who  is 
articulate  in  a  reverence  which  has  no  sanction  in  the 
ordinary  traffic  and  intercourse  of  life. 

In  suggesting  Mr.  Bennett's  "  repercussion  "  from 
Bursley,  to  use  one  of  his  own  words,  very  little  has 
been  said  about  his  plot.  But  Clayhanger  does  not, 
until  Edwin  adventures  to  Brighton  in  search  of  the 
widowed  Hilda,  depend  for  much  of  its  interest  on 
fortuitous  drama.  In  Edwin's  relations  with  his 
father  and  his  quiescent  sister,  Maggie,  in  his  evo- 
lution as  the  friend  of  the  well  bred,  amusing  Or- 
greaves,  there  is  no  definite  fictive  machination. 
This  does  not  mean  that  imagination  is  lacking. 
One  might  as  well  say  that  etching  is  less  imagina- 
tive than  a  water  color.  It  means  only  that  Mr. 
Bennett  has  attempted  the  most  difficult  art  of  all. 

Many  readers  of  Clayhanger  will  take  great 
pleasure  in  the  author's  style.  In  the  beginning 
especially  it  is  full  of  beauty,  and  those  pages  on  the 
wistful  and  innocent  quality  of  Edwin  as  a  boy  of 
sixteen  are  worth  reading  and  re-reading.  The 
scenes  between  Hilda  and  Edwin  are  skillfully  han- 
dled. Hilda's  first  letter  is  a  miracle.  But  the 
touch  in  the  book  that  struck  me  most  occurs  on 
Page  574»  in  the  talk  between  Edwin  and  Hilda.  It 
is  one  of  the  most  wonderful  touches  I  have  ever 
seen  in  a  novel.  It  proves  the  man  who  did  it  not 
only  a  master  of  craft  but  a  sheer  creator.  By  the 
mere  art  of  having  a  known  child  tell  his  full  name, 
he  gives  us  all  Hilda's  pent-up  exquisite  passion,  a 
communication  from  the  very  soul  of  one  of  the  most 
inarticulate  creatures  in  fiction.  It  is  because  Hilda 
is  so  little  explained  that  this  touch,  so  consistent  and 
yet  unexpected,  has  its  rare  essence  as  disclosure. 


That  is  the  way  life  unfolds,  but  life  is  usually  so 
much  more  subtle  than  fiction. 

"  The  publicans  were  jubilant  and  bars  sloppy." 
That  kind  of  acute  observation  is  common  in  Mr. 
Bennett,  and  a  delight.  In  sustained  description  he 
is  no  less  clever.  He  does  not  surpass  anywhere  in 
Clayhanger  the  account  of  the  execution  in  The  Old 
Wives'  Tale,  and  occasionally  he  descends  to  the 
Gallic  catalogue.  But  how  excellent  and  fascinating 
is  his  description  of  the  beach  at  Brighton  on  page 
583  !  People  who  have  not  read  the  book  may  say: 
"  No  doubt  it  is  fascinating,  but  what  good  is  it  to 
us  to  be  told  that  there  is  a  fine  description  on  page 
583  !"  Ah,  but  that  is  part  of  a  low  design  on  the 
reviewer's  side  to  provoke  the  reader  into  procuring 
Clayhanger.  At  all  costs.  Clayhanger  should  be 
read,  and  by  all  kinds  of  readers.  It  may  not  be  as 
good  as  the  novel  of  Hilda  Lessways,  which  is  to 
follow,  nor  as  good  as  the  third  novel  of  the  prom- 
ised trilogy.  But  it  is  the  best  novel  Mr.  Bennett 
has  yet  written,  not  forgetting  his  great  novel,  The 
Old  Wives'  Tale. 

October  21,  1910. 


[  155] 


THESE  TWAIN 

Arnold  Bennett  achieves  greatness  in 
his  conscientious  fiction  is  in  his  resolute  fidelity  to 
common  human  beings  as  they  are.  In  one  Ameri- 
can novel,  The  Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  there  was  a 
full  anticipation  of  his  method  and  spirit,  but  it  is 
difficult  to  find  anywhere  else  another  complete  exam- 
ple. Greatnesses  of  a  different  order,  greatnesses 
which  cannot  be  compared,  are  to  be  found  in  Mr. 
Bennett's  contemporaries,  but  he  above  the  rest  has 
mastered  the  art  of  preserving  in  fiction  the  color, 
the  tone,  the  flavor,  the  odor,  the  surface,  of  pro- 
vincial urban  usualness.  Such  usualness  has  been 
approached  in  varying  moods  by  numerous  English 
and  American  novelists.  Moore  and  Gissing  have 
attempted  it.  Frank  Norris  and  Henry  Fuller  and 
Edith  Wharton  have  come  at  it.  It  has  been  part 
of  the  problem  of  every  modern  bourgeois  novel. 
But  no  one  has  succeeded  as  well  as  Arnold  Bennett 
in  giving  it  comprehension  and  proportion.  What 
it  is,  this  routine  bourgeois  life,  most  of  us  know 
only  too  well.  It  is  immensely  that  familiarity 
which  breeds  disregard.  But  so  powerful  and  mi- 
raculous is  art  that  as  soon  as  this  life  is  presented 
to  us  by  one  to  whom  it  has  appealed,  presented  with 
acute  and  exquisite  fidelity,  it  becomes  poignant  and 
beautiful.  No  matter  .how  the  thing  in  itself  may 
estrange  us,  no  matter  how  we  may  despise  and  rage 

These  Twain,  by  Arnold  Bennett.    Doran,  New  York. 
[    156  ] 


at  its  conditions,  we  are  enabled  by  the  artist  to 
come  into  full  understanding  of  it,  and  we  are  grate- 
ful to  the  core  of  our  being  for  the  honesty  that  re- 
tained every  tedium,  every  banality,  every  inade- 
quacy, for  our  understanding.  To  give  the  sanc- 
tion of  art  to  the  nobility  of  human  nature  is  pre- 
cious, but  it  is  no  more  precious  than  to  bring  into 
the  sanction  of  art  the  unremitted  commonplace. 
For  it  proves  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  common- 
place, that  where  there  is  truth  there  must  be  beauty. 
And  in  his  account  of  the  married  life  of  Edwin 
Clayhanger  and  Hilda  Lessways  Mr.  Bennett  has 
adhered  to  the  veracity  that  implies  beauty.  No 
one  who  read  Clayhanger  or  Hilda  Lessways  could 
suppose  that  the  truth  of  their  marriage  would  be 
romantic.  It  is  not  romantic.  It  is,  in  the  conven- 
tional sense,  desperately  unromantic  and  disillusion- 
ing. But  it  is  full  of  an  assuaging  comprehension 
and  an  illimitable  tenderness.  To  be  tender  over 
unusualness  is  possible  to  almost  every  imagination. 
Women  who  tritely  accept  tuberculosis  in  negro  tene- 
ments can  weep  with  Stevenson  over  the  lepers. 
Men  who  are  bored  to  death  by  the  hardships  of 
scrubwomen  can  blaze  with  sympathy  for  a  prosti- 
tute. Sedentary  people  of  every  description  are  ex- 
alted at  the  thought  of  war.  But  it  needs  genuine 
imagination  to  remain  responsive  in  despite  of  repe- 
tition and  custom,  and  this  imagination  Mr.  Bennett 
possesses.  The  younger  novelists  strive  as  a  rule 
to  present  situations  that  are  complicated  by  some 
piquant  irregularity  —  an  illicit  lover  or  two,  a  bril- 
liant youth  horridly  addicted  to  heroin,  a  million- 
aire disciple  of  the  I.  W.  W.,  and  other  exciting  ex- 
hibitions of  the  orchid  in  Kansas.  But  the  material 

[  157  ] 


that  Mr.  Bennett  takes  is  the  material  of  disregarded 
and  unsensational  lives,  showing  by  the  aid  of  his 
devoted  imagination  the  depths  in  the  stuff  of  which 
those  apparently  ordered  lives  are  made. 

To  those  who  met  Clayhanger  and  Hilda  Less- 
ways  before,  the  task  of  depicting  their  union  seemed 
formidable.  Hilda  Lessways  was  an  inexplicable 
creature,  and  in  marriage  she  was  bound  in  some  de- 
gree to  be  explicated.  The  limitations  of  Edwin, 
on  the  other  hand,  presaged  an  attitude  as  husband 
which  could  hardly  fail  to  impede  that  swinging 
step.  And  then  there  was  the  child.  Could  Mr. 
Bennett  domesticate  Hilda  in  the  Five  Towns  with- 
out losing  her  magic?  Could  he  sustain  without 
wearying  us  the  patient  chronicle  of  confined  and 
dutiful  lives?  For  some,  perhaps,  the  answer  will 
not  be  favorable  to  Mr.  Bennett.  Admitting,  as  all 
must  admit,  the  incomparable  resources  of  his  inti- 
macy, the  triumphant  fertility  of  his  invention,  there 
will  be  readers  to  miss  in  Mrs.  Edwin  Clayhanger 
the  impetuosity  and  glamour  of  the  girl  whom  Edwin 
loved  from  afar.  These  readers  will  question 
whether  Hilda  is  the  same  Hilda.  They  will  be- 
lieve that  somewhere,  somehow,  Mr.  Bennett's  divi- 
nation has  faltered.  For  my  own  part,  I  am  not 
sure.  The  flagrance  which  permitted  Hilda  to  devi- 
ate from  Edwin  without  a  word  —  that  flagrance 
which  he  was  once  so  falsely  represented  as  accept- 
ing entire  —  seems  to  disappear  into  her  character 
unelucidated,  and  with  it  some  of  her  salience.  She 
began  as  mountain  torrent.  The  sweep  of  her  per- 
sonality in  marriage  is  the  sweep  of  a  channeled 
stream.  That  a  woman  of  such  brilliant  and  dash- 
ing gesture  should  so  subside,  that  she  should  attune 

[  158  ] 


herself  so  readily  to  a  marriage  so  signally  without 
ultimate  confidence,  is  a  great  deal  to  concede. 
That  there  should  be  so  few  attempts  at  ultimate 
confidence  is,  perhaps,  too  much  to  concede,  espe- 
cially as  the  marriage  is  rather  unwittingly  concen- 
trated on  the  standpoint  of  the  man.  But  the 
change  seems  to  me  for  the  most  part  greatly  credi- 
ble. Hilda's  taming,  her  acquiescence,  seems  to  me 
very  much  "  like  life." 

The  fact  was  that  she  had  married  him  for  the  look  in 
his  eyes.  It  was  a  sad  look,  and  beyond  that  it  could  not 
be  described.  Also,  a  little,  she  had  married  him  for  his 
bright  untidy  hair,  and  for  that  short  oblique  shake  of  the 
head  which  with  him  meant  a  greeting  or  an  affirmative. 
She  had  not  married  him  for  his  sentiments  nor  for  his  good- 
ness of  heart.  Some  points  in  him  she  did  not  like.  He 
had  a  tendency  to  colds,  and  she  hated  him  whenever  he  had 
a  cold.  She  often  detested  his  terrible  tidiness,  though  it 
was  a  convenient  failing.  More  and  more  she  herself  will- 
fully enjoyed  being  untidy,  as  her  mother  had  been  untidy. 
.  .  .  And  to  think  that  her  mother's  untidiness  used  to  annoy 
her!  On  the  other  hand  she  found  pleasure  in  humoring 
Edwin's  crotchetiness  in  regard  to  the  details  of  a  meal. 
She  did  not  like  his  way  of  walking,  which  was  ungainly, 
nor  his  way  of  standing,  which  was  infirm.  She  preferred 
him  to  be  seated.  She  could  not  but  regret  his  irresolution, 
and  his  love  of  ease.  However,  the  look  in  his  eyes  was 
paramount,  because  she  was  in  love  with  him.  She  knew 
that  he  was  more  deeply  and  helplessly  in  love  with  her  than 
she  with  him,  but  even  she  was  perhaps  tightlier  bound  than 
in  her  pride  she  thought. 

So  far  from  knowing  Hilda's  mind  about  himself, 
Edwin  goes  through  a  long  and  harrowing  process 
of  what  is  euphemistically  known  as  "  adjustment." 
And  the  complementary  process  is  necessitated  for 

[  159] 


Hilda  not  so  much  on  account  of  her  ignorance  of 
Edwin's  processes,  though  that  is  profound,  as  on 
account  of  the  exactions  of  her  contrary  will.  Judged 
hy  some  marriages,  this  conflict  may  seem  unusual. 
There  are  persons  who  inform  you  that  never  in 
their  married  life  have  they  heard  a  cross  word. 
But,  outside  such  feastings  on  angel-cake,  sharply  and 
touchingly  typical  is  the  Clayhangers'  alternation 
between  sacrament  and  sacrilege.  Not  by  words  do 
the  Clayhangers  reach  comprehension.  Hilda  is 
curiously  more  ready  to  surrender  her  body  than  to 
surrender  her  mind.  She  never  foregoes  a  hard  con- 
sciousness, "  it's  each  for  himself  in  marriage,  after 
all."  But  apart  from  this  rather  unusual  articula- 
tion of  the  warfare  that  is  marriage,  she  and  Edwin 
represent  with  extraordinary  accuracy  the  permuta- 
tions of  allied  but  rival  purposes  —  purposes  which 
can  no  more  be  made  identical  than  the  weather 
that  favors  oats  can  be  made  identical  with  the 
weather  that  favors  corn. 

One  thing  I  miss  in  Hilda  —  her  sexual  conscious- 
ness outside  marriage.  One  thing  I  vainly  expected 
in  Edwin  —  jealousy.  Even  of  the  resurrected 
George  Cannon  he  is  not  apprehensively  jealous, 
merely  fiercely  instinctive  that  Hilda  shall  not  see 
him.  One  thing  I  wondered  about  —  that  Hilda 
and  Edwin  did  not  have  a  child.  One  thing  I  dis- 
liked—  that  Hilda  "padded"  about  her  bedroom. 
But  that  last  is  the  pathos  of  things  as  they  are. 

If  Hilda  and  Edwin  were  not  set  in  the  community 
of  the  Five  Towns,  the  provincial  England  of  1892, 
the  peculiar  richness  and  thickness  of  their  veracity 
would  be  infinitely  less  powerful.  But  Mr.  Bennett 

[  160] 


has  revived  with  mastery  our  sense  of  that  com- 
munity, and  restored  it  to  us  in  new  significance  be- 
cause his  perception  and  his  charity  are  more  mature. 
The  death  of  Auntie  Hamps  alone  appeared  to  me 
a  lapse  in  artistic  intuition.  It  was  too  reminiscent 
of  unforgettable  reflections  in  The  Old  Wives'  Tale. 

Whether  Hilda  proves  less  liberating  than  one  ex- 
pected, or  Edwin  more  frustrated,  These  Twain 
completes  with  great  success  a  drama  for  which  many 
must  have  trembled.  There  are  things  about  These 
Twain  that  seem  fuzzy  —  the  delineation  of  Tertius 
Ingpen,  for  one,  and  the  business  capacity  of  Edwin. 
But  on  the  whole  there  is  a  power  and  security  of 
characterization  that  is  incontrovertible,  and  an  am- 
plitude of  incident  so  natural  and  so  significant  that 
the  sense  of  life  never  departs.  Whether  one  re- 
gards the  amusingly  accurate  idiom  of  young 
George,  the  picture  of  Trafalgar  Road  or  of  Dart- 
moor, the  flashes  of  anger  or  of  passion,  These 
Twain  is  the  product  of  a  searching  and  just  sus- 
ceptibility to  the  tone  and  movement  of  life. 

The  gratitude  that  is  due  to  any  real  artist  is  great, 
but  the  gratitude  due  to  an  artist  who  adheres  to  life 
in  its  common  motivation  seems  to  me  exceptional. 
The  very  sensitiveness  that  makes  a  man  an  artist 
tends  to  confine  him  to  those  situations  which  engage 
and  indulge  his  sensitiveness.  Because  the  world  of 
gross  and  urgent  action,  of  common  necessity,  is  hos- 
tile to  the  spectator,  the  spectator  easily  becomes 
hostile  in  return.  But  Mr.  Bennett  is  a  spectator 
who  has  retained  a  beautiful  sympathy  for  motiva- 
tions and  susceptibilities  alien  to  the  artistic  type. 
He  has  transcended  interest  in  "  ideas  "  and  pur- 

[  161  ] 


poses  to  spread  human  nature  before  us.  It  is  a 
triumph  of  disciplined  fictive  imagination,  a  triumph 
both  of  artist  and  man. 

December  4,  1915. 


I  162  ] 


GREEN  SICKNESS 

1  HERE  is  a  laconic  unreasonableness  about  the 
ways  of  creators.  It  is  quite  true  that  the  Irish  lit- 
erary revival  was  beginning  to  be  recognized  at  pre- 
cisely the  period  of  Mr.  Joyce's  novel,  and  it  is  also 
true  that  his  protagonist  is  a  student  in  Dublin  at  the 
hour  of  the  so-called  renaissance,  a  writer  and  poet 
and  dreamer  of  dreams.  So  perverse  is  life,  how- 
ever, there  is  scarcely  one  glimmer  in  this  landscape 
of  the  flame  which  is  supposed  to  have  illuminated 
Dublin  between  1890  and  1900.  If  Stephen  Deda- 
lus,  the  young  man  portrayed  in  this  novel,  had  be- 
longed to  the  Irish  revival,  it  would  be  much  easier 
for  outsiders  to  "  place  "  him.  The  essential  fact 
is,  he  belonged  to  a  more  characteristic  group  which 
this  novel  alone  has  incarnated.  One  almost  despairs 
of  conveying  it  to  the  person  who  has  conventional- 
ized his  idea  of  Ireland  and  modern  Irish  literature, 
yet  there  is  a  poignant  Irish  reality  to  be  found  in 
few  existing  plays  and  no  preexistent  novel,  pre- 
sented here  with  extraordinary  candor  and  beauty 
and  power. 

It  is  a  pleasant  assumption  of  national  mythology 
that  the  southern  Irish  are  a  bright  and  witty  people, 
effervescent  on  the  sunny  side  and  pugnacious  on  the 
other,  but  quick  to  act  in  any  event,  and  frequently 
charming  and  carefree  and  irresponsible.  It  may  be 
that  the  Irish  exhibit  this  surface  to  outsiders  and 

A   Portrait   of  the  Artist    as    a  Young   Man,   by   James  Joyce. 
Huebsch,  New  York. 

[   163   ] 


•  afford  a  case  of  street  angel  and  house  devil  on  a 
national  scale,  or  it  may  be  that  the  English  landlord 
has  chosen  to  see  the  Irishman  as  funny  in  the  way 
the  Southern  gentleman  chooses  to  see  the  Negro  as 
funny,  but,  however  the  assumption  got  started,  it 
has  been  fortified  by  generations  of  story-tellers  and 
has  provided  a  fair  number  of  popular  writers  with 
a  living.  It  is  only  when  a  person  with  the  invincible 
honesty  of  James  Joyce  comes  to  write  of  Dubliners 
as  they  are,  a  person  who  is  said  to  be  mordant 
largely  because  he  isn't  mushy,  that  the  discrepancy 
between  the  people  and  the  myth  is  apparent.  When 
one  says  Dubliners,  "  as  they  are,"  one  of  course  is 
pronouncing  a  preference.  One  is  simply  insisting 
that  the  Irishmen  of  James  Joyce  are  more  nearly 
like  one's  own  estimate  of  them  than  the  Irishmen 
of  an  amiable  fabulist  like  George  Birmingham.  But 
there  is  the  whole  of  the  exquisite  Portrait  of  the 
Artist  as  a  Young  Man  to  substantiate  the  asser- 
tion that  a  proud,  cold,  critical,  suspicious,  meticulous 
human  being  is  infinitely  more  to  be  expecte.d  among 
educated  Catholic  Irishmen  than  the  sort  of  squireen 
whom  Lever  once  glorified.  If  this  is  a  new  type  in 
Ireland,  come  into  existence  with  the  recent  higher 
education  of  Catholics,  one  can  only  say  that  it  is 
now  by  far  the  most  important  type  to  recognize. 
Bernard  Shaw  suggested  it  in  the  London  Irishman, 
Larry  Doyle,  who  appeared  in  John  Bull's  Other 
Island,  but  the  main  character  of  the  present  novel 
is  much  more  subtly  inflected  and  individualized 
than  Larry  Doyle,  and  is  only  said  to  belong  to  a 
type  to  intimate  that  his  general  mode  is  charac- 
teristic. 

Mr.  Joyce's  power  is  not  shown  in  any  special  in- 
[  164] 


ventiveness.  A  reader  of  novels  will  see  at  once  that 
he  has  never  even  thought  of  "  plot  "  in  the  ordinary 
sense,  or  considered  the  advantage  or  importance 
of  consulting  the  preferences  of  his  reader.  The 
thing  he  writes  about  is  the  thing  he  knows  best,  him- 
self, himself  at  boarding  school  and  university,  and 
any  radical  variation  on  the  actual  terms  of  that 
piercing  knowledge  he  has  declined  to  attempt.  He 
has  sought  above  everything  to  reveal  those  circum- 
stances of  his  life  which  had  poignancy,  and  the  firm- 
est claim  on  him  to  being  written  was  not  that  a 
thing  should  be  amenable  to  his  intentions  as  a  so- 
phisticated novelist,  but  that  a  thing  should  have  com- 
plete personal  validity.  It  did  not  weigh  with  him 
at  any  moment  that  certain  phrases  or  certain  inci- 
dents would  be  intensely  repugnant  to  some  readers. 
Was  the  phrase  interwoven  with  experience?  Was 
the  incident  part  of  the  fabric  of  life?  He  asked 
this  searchingly,  and  asked  no  more.  It  is  not  even 
likely  that  he  made  inquiry  why  out  of  all  that  he 
could  write,  he  selected  particularly  to  reveal  details 
that  seldom  find  expression.  Had  he  made  the  in- 
quiry he  might  well  have  answered  that  the  mere 
consciousness  of  silence  is  an  incitement  to  expres- 
sion, that  expression  is  the  only  vengeance  a  mortal 
can  take  on  the  restrictions  to  which  he  finds  him- 
self subject.  If  others  submit  to  those  restrictions 
it  is  their  own  affair.  To  have  the  truth  one  must 
have  a  man's  revelation  of  that  which  was  really  sig- 
nificant to  himself. 

Considering  that  this  portrait  is  concluded  before 
its  subject  leaves  college  one  may  gather  that  the 
really  significant  relations  are  familial  and  religious, 
and  that  the  adjustment  is  between  a  critical  spirit 

[  165  ] 


and  its  environment.  What  gives  its  intensity  to  the 
portrait  is  the  art  Mr.  Joyce  has  mastered  of  com- 
municating the  incidents  of  Stephen's  career  through 
the  emotions  they  excited  in  him.  We  do  not  per- 
ceive Stephen's  father  and  mother  by  description. 
We  get  them  by  the  ebb  and  flood  of  Stephen's  feel- 
ing, and  while  there  are  many  passages  of  singularly 
lifelike  conversation  —  such,  for  example,  as  the 
wrangle  about  Parnell  that  ruined  the  Christmas  din- 
ner or  the  stale  banter  that  enunciated  the  father's 
return  to  Cork  —  the  viridity  is  in  Stephen's  soul. 
"  Stephen  watched  the  three  glasses  being  raised 
from  the  counter  as  his  father  and  his  two  cronies 
drank  to  the  memory  of  their  past.  An  abyss  of 
fortune  or  of  temperament  sundered  him  from  them. 
His  mind  seemed  older  than  theirs:  it  shone  coldly 
on  their  strifes  and  happiness  and  regrets  like  a 
moon  upon  a  younger  earth.  No  life  or  youth  stirred 
in  him  as  it  had  stirred  in  them.  He  had  known 
neither  the  pleasures  of  companionship  with  others 
nor  the  vigor  of  rude  male  health  nor  filial  piety. 
Nothing  stirred  within  his  soul  but  a  cold  and  cruel 
and  loveless  lust.  His  childhood  was  dead  or  lost 
and  with  it  his  soul  capable  of  simple  joys  and  he 
was  drifting  amid  life  like  the  barren  shell  of  the 


moon." 


It  is  his  mortal  sin  of  masturbation  that  preys  most 
terribly  on  this  youth,  and  he  suffers  all  the  blasting 
isolation  which  is  created  by  the  sense  of  sin  in  con- 
nection with  it.  Eventually  he  makes  a  "  retreat  " 
—  he  is  being  educated  by  the  Jesuits  —  and  goes  to 
confession  and  for  a  time  knows  religious  happiness. 
The  explicitness  of  this  experience  is  more  telling 
than  the  veiled  account  of  sexual  stupidity  in  Samuel 

[  166] 


Butler's  Way  of  All  Flesh,  and  Mr.  Joyce  is  more 
successful  that  Samuel  Butler  in  making  religious  be- 
lief seem  real.  The  efforts  of  a  Jesuit  Father  to 
suggest  a  religious  vocation  to  Stephen  are  the  begin- 
ning of  the  end  of  his  religion.  In  "  lucid,  supple, 
periodic  prose  "  Mr.  Joyce  describes  the  transition 
from  devotional  life  and  a  private  specializing  in 
mortification  to  the  acceptance  of  nature  and  the 
earth.  "  His  soul  had  arisen  from  the  grave  of  boy- 
hood, spurning  her  grave-clothes.  Yes !  Yes !  Yes  I 
He  would  create  proudly  out  of  the  freedom  and 
power  of  his  soul,  as  the  great  artificer  whose  name 
he  bore,  a  living  thing,  new  and  soaring  and  beauti- 
ful, impalpable,  imperishable."  The  u  Yes !  Yesl 
Yes !  "  gives  that  touch  of  intense  youthfulness  which 
haunts  the  entire  book,  even  though  Mr.  Joyce  can 
be  so  superb  in  flaunting  Aristotle  and  Aquinas. 

The  last  chapter  of  the  portrait  gives  one  the 
esprit  of  the  Catholic  nationalist  students  in  Uni- 
versity College.  It  is  a  marvelous  version  of  scur- 
rilous, supercilious,  callow  youth.  Mr.  Joyce's  sub- 
ject is  not  in  sympathy  with  the  buzzing  internation- 
alist any  more  than  with  the  arcane  Irishman  whom 
he  compares  to  Ireland,  "  a  batlike  soul  waking  to 
the  consciousness  of  itself  in  darkness  and  secrecy 
and  loneliness."  Stephen  walks  by  himself,  disdain- 
ful and  bitter,  in  love  and  not  in  love,  a  poet  at  dawn 
and  a  sneerer  at  sunset,  cold  exile  of  "  this  stinking 
dunghill  of  a  world." 

A  novel  in  which  a  sensitive,  critical  young  man 
is  completely  expressed  as  he  is  can  scarcely  be  ex- 
pected to  be  pleasant.  A  Portrait  of  the  Artist  as 
a  Young  Man  is  not  entirely  pleasant.  But  it  has 
su.cn  beauty,  such  love  of  beauty,  such  intensity  of 

[  167  ] 


feeling,  such  pathos,  such  candor,  it  goes  beyond  any- 
thing in  English  that  reveals  the  inevitable  malaise 
of  serious  youth.  Mr.  Joyce  has  a  peculiar  nar- 
rative method,  and  he  would  have  made  things 
clearer  if  he  had  adopted  H.  G.  Wells's  scheme  of 
giving  a  paragraphed  section  to  each  episode.  As 
the  book  is  now  arranged,  it  requires  some  imagina- 
tion on  the  part  of  the  reader.  The  Catholic  "  re- 
treat "  also  demands  attentiveness,  it  is  reported 
with  such  acrimonious  zeal.  But  no  one  who  has 
any  conception  of  the  Russian-like  frustrations  and 
pessimisms  of  the  thin-skinned  and  fine-grained  Irish- 
man, from  early  boarding  school  onward,  can  miss 
the  tenacious  fidelity  of  James  Joyce.  He  has  made 
a  rare  effort  to  transcend  every  literary  convention 
as  to  his  race  and  creed,  and  he  has  had  high  success. 
Many  people  will  furiously  resent  his  candor, 
whether  about  religion  or  nationalism  or  sex.  But 
candor  is  nobility  in  this  instance. 

March  3,  191 J. 


[  168  ] 


NOVELS  AND  NOVELISTS,  4 


WAR  AND  PEACE 

1  HERE  is  a  conspiracy  among  people  who  have 
read  great  books  to  make  the  account  of  them  dis- 
mally impressive.  People  urge  you  to  read  a  mas- 
terpiece in  the  same  way  that  they  urge  you  to  join 
the  City  Club  or  subscribe  to  the  Survey.  They  want 
to  do  you  good.  For  years  people  have  told  me  to 
read  War  and  Peace.  By  Tolstoy.  "  It's  stupen- 
dous," they've  said,  "  it  takes  you  a  month  to  read 
it  —  three  large  volumes.  It  has  more  characters 
in  it  than  you  can  possibly  remember.  It's  immense. 
It  is  a  panorama  of  the  Napoleonic  wars,  of  the  in- 
vasion of  Russia  and  the  retreat  from  Moscow.  It 
explodes  Napoleon.  It's  the  greatest  novel  ever 
written." 

This  to  me  is  the  bare  and  glistening  hook.  I 
want  bait.  There  may  be  voracious  natures  that 
crave  three-volume  panoramic  novels.  I  envy  such, 
but  do  not  seek  to  emulate  them.  And  I  avoid  their 
suggestions. 

But  this  tone  is  exactly  the  official  tone  adopted 
by  Vicomte  de  Vogue  about  War  and  Peace.  It 
"  presents  us,"  he  says  solemnly,  "  with  a  complete 
tableau  of  Russian  society  during  the  great  Na- 
poleonic wars  from  1805  to  1815.  The  stage  is 
immense  and  the  actors  are  innumerable;  among 
them  are  three  emperors  with  their  ministers,  their 
marshals,  and  their  generals,  and  a  countless  ret- 

War  and  Peace,  by  Leo  Tolstoy.    Dutton,  New  York. 


Inue  of  minor  officers,  soldiers,  nobles  and  peasants. 
We  are  transported  by  turns  from  the  salons  of  St. 
Petersburg  to  the  camps  of  war,  from  Moscow  to 
the  country  districts.  And  all  these  diverse  and 
varied  scenes  are  joined  together  with  a  controlling 
purpose  that  brings  everything  into  harmony.  Each 
one  of  the  prolonged  series  of  constantly  changing 
tableaux  is  of  remarkable  beauty  and  palpitating  with 
life.  The  interminable  series  of  incidents,  of  por- 
traits, of  reflections  which  the  author  presents  to  us, 
unrolls  itself  around  a  few  fictitious  personages;  but 
the  true  hero  of  the  story  is  Russia  in  her  desperate 
struggle  against  the  foreigner,  and  the  real  person- 
ages, Alexander,  Napoleon,  Koutouzof,  Speransky, 
occupy  almost  as  prominent  a  position  as  the  imag- 
inary ones." 

The  pivot  is  indeed  Russia.  That  is  a  grave  and 
genuine  observation.  But  now  that  I  have  read  War 
and  Peace  my  heart  rebels  against  the  whole  tone  in 
which  this  novel  is  discussed.  Emperors,  marshals, 
ministers,  generals!  It  is  not  for  these  that  Tolstoy 
wrote  this  great,  humane,  wise,  tender  book.  Some- 
where near  the  middle  of  it  these  words  about  his 
War  occur:  "  It  happened  because  it  was  bound  to 
happen;  and  so  it  came  to  pass  that  some  millions  of 
men,  ignoring  all  common  sense  and  human  feeling, 
started  to  march  eastward  to  slaughter  their  fellow- 
creatures,  just  as,  some  centuries  before,  unnumbered 
swarms  had  rushed  down  on  the  west,  killing  all  in 
their  way."  It  is  of  this  vast  untoward  flood  of  war 
that  Tolstoy  was  thinking,  this  torrent  in  which  the 
men  and  women  of  his  story  are  caught,  some  to  ride, 
some  to  spin,  some  to  struggle,  some  to  drown.  And 
although  he  stands  for  Russia,  his  country,  in  the 

[  172  ] 


invasion,  no  military  genius  is  the  hero  of  his  story. 
There  are  no  heroes,  only  human  beings,  giving 
their  impress  to  events  or  taking  their  impress  from 
them;  and  "the  heart  of  kings  is  in  the  hand  of 
God." 

The  tumult  of  Austerlitz,  Friedland,  Borodino,  is 
to  be  found  in  War  and  Peace.  Tolstoy  has  dram- 
atized each  battle  by  focussing  it  at  one  point  after 
another,  and  in  one  person  after  another  —  persons 
we  already  know.  We  stand  on  the  bridge  as  it  is 
being  shelled.  We  see  the  army  stream  by.  We 
charge  with  young  Rostow's  squadron  across  "  the 
gulf  of  terror."  We  run  with  him  on  foot  from  the 
vicious  hook-nosed  Frenchman,  run  in  fear.  With 
Bolkonsky  we  rage  at  the  moment  of  retreat,  seize 
the  standard  and  advance,  fall,  open  eyes  on  "  the 
deep,  far  away  sky  above."  With  Nicholas  we  at- 
tack without  orders,  wince  at  killing  and  are  deco- 
rated. With  Tonchine  we  are  so  insane  as  not  to 
fall  back,  we  save  the  day  with  one  battery,  and  are 
reprimanded  for  losing  two  guns.  With  Peter  we 
are  civilians  wandering  aimlessly  on  the  battlefield, 
ending  up  behind  the  breastwork  where  the  fighting 
is  thickest.  With  Bolkonsky  again  we  stand  under 
fire  on  that  fatal  day  when  the  French  got  the  range 
of  the  reserve. 

'Good    God!    what    has    happened?     In    the 
stomach?     Then  he  is  done  for!  '  said  the  officers. 

*  It  actually  grazed  my  ear ! '  said  the  aide-de- 
camp." 

And  with  Petia,  too,  the  youngster,  we  spend  that 
last  wonderful  night  on  which  he  listens  to  his  or- 
chestra playing  an  unknown  beautiful  hymn. 

But  it  is  not  this  multiplicity  of  impressions,  this 
[  173  ] 


incredible  resource  and  diversity,  which  stands  out 
as  the  boon  of  War  and  Peace.  Other  titanic  novel- 
ists have  assembled  details  with  energy  and  piled  up 
effects  only  a  little"  less  tremendous.  Zola  could  do 
it,  Balzac,  Dostoevsky.  It  is  something  else  which 
distinguishes  War  and  Peace  and  gives  it  its  indis- 
putable glory.  As  one's  mind  roams  back  over  the 
thronging  events,  one  is  for  the  moment  bewildered. 
There  is  no  order  in  them  and  no  end  to  them.  But 
whether  one  begins  to  reflect  on  Natacha  or  Bol- 
konsky  or  Maria  or  Peter;  whether  it  is  the  death  of 
Peter's  sire  or  the  dreadful  affair  between  Natacha 
and  Anatole,  or  Maria's  relations  with  her  tyran- 
nical father,  or  the  sad  unearthly  estrangements  of 
Bolkonsky  before  he  died;  whether  it  is  the  grand 
barbaric  hunt  or  the  magnificent  sleigh-ride  or  Nata- 
cha's  ball  or  Peter's  initiation  into  freemasonry  or 
his  duel  or  his  imprisonment  and  imminent  execution 
—  whatever  one  of  these  ramified  scenes  comes  to 
mind,  it  is  instinct  with  the  great  spirit  of  Tolstoy. 
Like  a  full  and  equable  light  he  reveals  every  inflec- 
tion and  contour.  Keen  to  expose  as  well  as  to  dis- 
play, he  has  for  peace  as  well  as  war  the  same  height- 
ened faculties,  the  same  depths  of  sympathy,  the 
same  psychological  zeal.  When  he  philosophizes 
fatalistically  about  war  one  may  decline  to  follow 
him.  When  he  passes  judgment  on  Napoleon  one 
may  hesitate  to  accept  him.  But  when  he  sets  afoot 
any  encounter  between  man  and  man,  or  man  and 
woman,  or  man  and  nature,  he  is  a  master  in  dramatic 
intensity,  in  beauty,  in  understanding,  in  that  clean- 
ness and  firmness  and  economy  of  line  which  comes 
only  with  a  genius  for  sincerity. 

Natacha  is  the  most  vibrant  creature  in  War  and 
[  174] 


Peace.  It  is  the  triumph  of  Tolstoy's  art  that  she 
is  carried  from  saucy  childhood  to  maternal  ampli- 
tude and  successfully  identified  in  every  process  of 
that  change.  No  torrent  that  ever  ran  from  high 
hills  to  a  smooth  union  with  the  sea  was  more  per- 
fectly defined  in  its  movements.  The  same  is  true 
of  Maria,  perhaps,  a  stream  that  rises  on  a  plateau, 
but  the  person  of  Natacha  is  so  charming  that  she 
arrests  one  for  her  own  sake.  Take  her  at  sixteen, 
cajoling  her  mother: 

"  Come,  mamma,  do  not  laugh  so;  the  bed  shakes!  You 
are  just  like  me;  you  laugh  as  easily  as  I  do.  Wait  a  min- 
ute," and  taking  her  mother's  hand  again  she  went  on  with 
her  fortune-telling:  "June,  July  and  August  —  mamma, 
he  is  desperately  in  love;  do  you  not  think  so?  —  was  any 
one  ever  so  much  in  love  with  you  ?  And  he  is  nice  —  very 
nice !  Only  not  quite  to  my  taste ;  straight  and  narrow  like 
the  tall  clock  in  the  dining  room.  Do  you  not  understand? 
quite  narrow  and  pale  gray.  .  .  ." 

"What  nonsense!" 

"  Why  don't  you  understand  ?  Nicholas  would  under- 
stand exactly.  Now  Besoukhow  is  blue,  dark  blue  and  red ; 
and  he  makes  me  think  of  a  square  thing.  .  .  ." 

"  I  believe  you  are  flirting  with  him  too  .  .  ."  and  again 
the  countess  could  not  help  laughing. 

And  then  see  her  with  Prince  Andrew  Bolkonsky. 
He  had  kept  their  marriage  waiting,  in  deference 
to  his  father.  On  the  eve  of  his  return  she  had 
fallen  in  love  with  an  adventurer.  Bolkonsky  never 
saw  her  again  until  he  was  dying. 

"  Forgive  me,"  she  murmured,  looking  up,  "  Forgive 
me." 

"  I  love  you,"  he  said. 
"  Forgive  me." 

I  175  ] 


"What  have  I  to  forgive?" 

"  Forgive  me  for  what  I  did,"  said  Natacha,  in  a  low 
voice,  and  with  a  painful  effort. 

"  I  love  you  better  than  I  did  before,"  replied  Prince 
Andrew,  lifting  her  head  to  look  in  her  eyes,  which  were 
timidly  fixed  on  his,  swimming  with  tears  of  joy,  but  lumi- 
nous with  love  and  pity.  Her  pale,  thin  features,  and  lips 
swollen  with  crying,  had,  at  this  moment,  no  trace  of 
beauty;  but  Prince  Andrew  saw  nothing  but  her  beautiful 
eyes  radiant  through  tears. 

In  one  sense  it  is  the  story  which  makes  a  novel 
worth  reading,  meaning  by  the  story  the  calculated 
progress  of  events.  There  is  that  famous  formula, 
the  good  story  well  told.  But  it  is  forlorn  to  seek 
in  the  story  all  by  itself,  no  matter  how  thrilling, 
the  explanation  of  the  peculiar  joy  which  is  bestowed 
by  a  work  of  art.  What  a  man  has  to  tell  is  signifi- 
cant. How  well  he  tells  it,  is  also  significant.  More 
significant  than  either  is  the  spirit  with  which  he  is 
endowed.  By  what  sensitive  and  mysterious  process 
this  spirit  of  the  creator  steals  into  a  narrative,  gives 
it  his  livingness,  no  one  has  yet  defined.  But  it  is 
this  subtle  presence,  this  communication  through  nar- 
rative of  a  being  that  has  conceived  the  world  afresh, 
which  makes  the  novel  an  artistic  form.  Persons 
who  tell  you  that  War  and  Peace  has  for  its  subject- 
matter  the  fate  of  Russia  in  the  wars  a  hundred  years 
ago  are  sticking  to  an  important  fact.  But  there  is 
more  in  it  than  their  honest  reports  can  tell  you. 
There  is  a  great  testimony  to  life  generously  and 
deeply  experienced;  to  mankind's  emotions  in  peace 
or  strife;  to  the  vast  variety  of  human  nature  that 
this  one  man  has  embraced  and  transmuted.  There 
is  in  this  miraculous  imaginative  organism,  as  in  any 

[  176] 


other  organism,  life  and  the  impulse  of  life.     There 
is  something  that  belongs  only  to  life  itself. 
is  a  beauty  and  a  reality  indefinable. 

September  30,  1916. 


I  177  ] 


CRIME  AND  PUNISHMENT 

IN  the  great  Russian  novels  there  is  a  naive,  an 
extraordinarily  fresh  personal  impression  of  life. 
Not  only  do  the  Russians  conceive  specific  impres- 
sions with  the  clarity  of  children,  but  they  have  the 
gift  of  placing  a  true  value  on  their  emotions.  The 
moment  does  indeed  pass  when  they  stand  on  the 
threshold,  tremulous  and  eager,  lips  parted,  cheeks 
flushed,  heart  beating  high.  But  whether  life  leaves 
them  reverent  or  bitter,  deeply  humble  or  sadly  ironi- 
cal, it  has  given  them  treasured  and  ineradicable 
memories.  And  not  only  do  the  great  interpreters 
of  Russian  life  seem  to  evaluate  their  experience  ac- 
cording to  the  dreams  and  expectations  of  youth,  but 
they  never  appear  to  be  drained  of  their  human  sym- 
pathies. There  is  no  great  Russian  novel  that  is  not 
instinct  with  the  brotherhood  of  man. 

In  our  own  novels  there  is  often  a  sense  of  the 
brotherhood  of  man,  but  life  in  the  west  is  provided 
with  so  many  checks  and  balances  that  to  be  real 
(that  is,  to  live  at  first  hand)  is  almost  impossible, 
and  human  sympathies  are  insulated  by  a  tame  and 
unemotional  religion  and  insistence  on  property  dis- 
tinctions, a  social  externality,  and  especially  by  the 
Anglo-Saxon  tendency  to  compromise  and  tempor- 
ize. As  a  theory  the  brotherhood  of  man  survives. 
In  practice  we  find  ourselves  safer  and  more  com- 
fortable by  avoiding  the  consequences  of  such  a  the- 

Crime  and  Punishment,  by  Fedor  Dostoevsky.     Button,  New  York. 
[    178   ] 


ory.  The  result  is  a  fiction  which  has  excellencies  of 
its  own,  but  which,  compared  with  Russian,  is  cribbed 
and  cabined. 

In  Crime  and  Punishment  the  horizontal  partitions 
of  society  are  pulled  out,  as  well  as  the  vertical,  and 
we  observe  with  Dostoevsky  the  fate  of  a  man, 
wretchedly  poor,  who  contemplates,  commits  and  ex- 
piates the  crime  of  murder.  In  writing  of  Raskol- 
nikov,  Dostoevsky  has  a  singularly  different  manner 
from  Tolstoy.  Tolstoy  has  been  called  crazy,  but 
there  never  was  a  writer  who  had  such  a  clear,  such 
a  reasonable  view  of  people.  He  delights  to  show 
us  his  hero  as  he  wakes  in  the  morning  in  bed,  and 
to  depict  each  move  as  the  hero  bathes  and  shaves 
and  puts  on  one  garment  after  another,  and  to  tell 
us  exactly  how  much  toast  and  how  much  coffee  he 
took  for  breakfast,  and  how  he  read  the  morning 
paper,  and  agreed  or  disagreed  with  the  editorials, 
one  by  one.  By  such  details  of  daily  life,  familiar 
to  every  man  and  interesting  for  the  most  personal 
reasons,  Tolstoy  gets  our  confidence.  We  know 
these  things  to  be  true.  We  have  felt  them  and  seen 
them,  and  we  marvel  at  the  insight  of  this  man  who 
interprets  us  to  ourselves.  When  it  comes  to  the  less 
familiar  events,  we  are  already  persuaded  of  Tol- 
stoy's immense  good  sense  and  wisdom  (which  cer- 
tainly exists)  and  he  has  taken  the  best  way  to  over- 
whelm us  by  his  conclusions.  Nothing  at  all  of  this 
large,  paternal,  almost  omniscient  feeling  is  com- 
municated by  Dostoevsky.  Dostoevsky  does  not 
surround  his  story  with  the  atmosphere  of  familiar- 
ity and  common  sense.  He  does  not  appear  to  be 
saying:  This  you  know.  On  the  contrary,  his  novel 
is  bathed  in  sepulchral  blackness,  and  his  murderer 

[  179  ] 


moves  about  the  stage  in  a  single  intense  spot  of 
light.  There  is  no  familiarity  about  the  scene,  but 
an  exceptional  set  of  circumstances,  presented  with 
an  uncanny  sense  of  their  morbidity.  Each  defini- 
tion of  Raskolnikov's  state  of  mind  insists  upon  his 
fever  and  his  monomania.  It  is  actually  a  clinic  — 
a  clinic,  however,  of  such  extraordinary  realism  that 
it  is  very  nearly  insupportable. 

It  is  the  convention  among  Anglo-Saxons  to  desist 
•  when  a  situation  becomes  too  intense,  and  to  convert 
the  tale  of  horror  into  palpable  fiction  —  a  game  at 
horror.  There  is  no  game  about  Crime  and  Pun- 
ishment. The  pool  of  blood  into  which  Raskolnikov 
accidentally  steps  after  he  has  murdered  the  old 
money-lender  is  the  most  real  thing  one  can  conceive. 
One  does  not  see  that  blood.  But  one  feels  Ras- 
kolnikov's ever  present  sense  of  it.  One  feels  his 
terror  lest  he  step  in  it,  or  get  blood  on  his  clothes. 
One  realizes  his  chilled  frenzy  as  he  washes  his 
hands,  and  his  renewed  horror  as  he  discovers  that 
the  blood  has  got  on  his  boots.  It  is  not  grewsome 
exactly.  It  is  simply  real.  And  Raskolnikov's  sub- 
sequent delirium  affects  one  as  a  nightmare.  To 
wake  him  up,  to  help  him  remove  the  traces  of  blood, 
to  settle  the  uncertainty  of  his  concealments,  is  an 
unceasing  impulse.  And  to  have  Raskolnikov  511  in 
the  novel  is  worse  than  having  an  invalid  in  the 
house,  he  is  so  much  more  helpless  and  incapable  of 
help  than  a  human  invalid  could  be.  It  is  "  only  a 
book  "  of  course.  But  it  is  a  book  that  obsesses  its 
reader  night  and  day.  The  crime  of  Raskolnikov 
stains  one's  own  conscience.  Unbearably  does  Dos- 
toevsky  keep  up  the  suspense  and  agony,  and  it  is 
only  after  passing  through  the  worst  vicissitudes  of 

[  180  ] 


a  guilty  criminal  that  a  partial  and  scrupulously  hon- 
est relief  is  granted. 

Had  Raskolnikov  had  any  moral  justification  for 
his  crime,  or  been  a  defenseless  victim  of  society,  this 
book  would  have  few  elements  of  horror.  But  Ras- 
kolnikov is  an  "  intellectual."  His  crime  is  the  out- 
come of  a  monomania.  Although  a  destitute  stu- 
dent, anxious  to  help  the  mother  and  sister  he  loves, 
the  motives  of  his  crime  are  utterly  insufficient  to 
support  it.  It  is  morbidity,  diseased  intellectualism, 
which  makes  the  plan  possible.  And  the  thing  that 
gives  the  book  its  peculiar  hold  on  the  imagination 
is  the  shocking  lucidity  of  Raskolnikov.  If  he  were 
remorseful,  the  centre  of  one's  interests  would  be  his 
moral  fate.  But  for  the  first  400  pages  one  lives 
with  the  man  in  the  midst  of  exterior  circumstances. 
It  is  agony  over  his  possible  detection  that  is  ex- 
citing. One  watches  Raskolnikov  in  horrible  breath- 
less suspense  as  one  might  watch  a  crazy  man  clam- 
ber up  the  Flatiron  building,  hand  on  hand.  And 
where  Dostoevsky  has  surpassed  all  other  masters  of 
horror  is  in  communicating  Raskolnikov's  own  trepi- 
dations, as  well  as  the  natural  dangers  of  his  posi- 
tion. The  spot  light  in  which  Raskolnikov  moves 
through  real  and  imaginary  dangers  penetrates  his 
brain.  We  see  him  as  others  see  him,  and  also  as 
he  sees  himself. 

If  the  interest  of  Raskolnikov's  situation  were 
confined  to  its  dangers,  Crime  and  Punishment  would 
be  essentially  melodrama.  Where  Dostoevsky  con- 
verts it  from  melodrama  is  in  the  sympathy  with 
which  he  depicts  the  murderer's  environment.  There 
is  a  curious  quality  in  Dostoevsky's  recital.  It  has 
at  times  the  fitful,  outrageous  character  of  a  dream, 

[  181  ] 


But  when  the  situation  is  brought  into  focus,  and 
Dostoevsky  escapes  his  Dickens-like  tendency  to  draw 
grotesques  and  freaks  (increased  so  much  by  his 
dwelling  on  neurasthenic  and  hallucinatory  factors), 
he  induces  the  reader  to  share  his  exalted  sympathy 
for  misfortune  and  wretchedness.  During  the  period 
when  Raskolnikov  is  brooding  over  his  plan,  he  wan- 
ders into  a  filthy  saloon,  where  he  is  joined  by  a 
fatuous  drunkard.  Into  Raskolnikov's  ears  the 
drunkard  pours  all  his  woes.  It  is  the  kind  of  story 
almost  everyone  has  heard,  but  Dostoevsky  gives  it 
a  new  human  significance.  To  his  raucous  tenement 
home  Raskolnikov  accompanies  the  drunkard,  and 
there  he  meets  the  consumptive  Catherine  Ivanovna, 
whose  blows  but  increase  the  humility  of  the  drunken 
husband.  It  is  not  De  Morgan's  sentimentalism  or 
Tolstoy's  religious  spirit  that  pervades  this  scene,  but 
an  understanding  at  once  more  caustic  and  more  in- 
timately sympathetic.  Catherine  Ivanovna  is  a  por- 
trait full  of  wry  humor,  and  Sonia,  from  under  whose 
hat  appeared  "  a  poor  little  wan  and  frightened  coun- 
tenance," is  a  character  beautifully  and  sublimely 
conceived.  It  is  she  who  has  taken  the  yellow  ticket 
at  the  behest  of  Catherine  Ivanovna,  and  it  is  to  her 
that  Raskolnikov  eventually  unburdens  his  soul. 
Were  the  irony,  the  fantastic  humor,  of  these  slums 
less  clearly  perceived,  the  pathos  of  Sonia  could  not 
deeply  touch  us.  But  Dostoevsky  has  no  brief  for 
the  miserable.  And  it  is  characteristic  that  when  he 
makes  Raskolnikov  empty  his  pockets  for  the  drunk- 
ard's home  he  lets  it  be  considered  by  one  a  noble 
impulse,  and  by  another  a  pathological  sympathy,  an 
aberration. 

The  most  moving  scene  in  the  book  is  that  in  which 
[  182  ] 


Raskolnikov  comes  for  the  first  time  out  of  the  mor- 
bid and  furtive  mood  in  which  he  has  tortured  his 
mother  and  sister,  and  visits  Sonia  in  her  squalid 
room.  Here  the  desire  to  confess  himself  is  quali- 
fied by  his  abnormal  fear  that  Sonia  is  mad.  At  last, 
however,  her  heartbroken  faith  that  God  will  save 
Catherine  Ivanovna  leads  to  his  own  sincere  and  bit- 
ter outcry:  "There  may  be  no  God."  Here  Sonia 
breaks  down.  "  Several  minutes  went  by  whilst  he 
continued  his  tramp,  not  noticing  her.  Suddenly  he 
approached  her.  His  eyes  gleamed,  his  lips  trem- 
bled, and,  resting  his  two  hands  on  her  shoulders, 
he  cast  an  angry  look  on  this  face  bathed  in  tears. 
In  a  moment  he  bent  downwards,  kissing  the  girl's 
feet.  She  started  back  frightened,  as  she  would  have 
done  from  a  madman.  For  Raskolnikov's  face  this 
moment  was  that  of  one. 

"'What  are  you  doing?  And  to  me?'  stam- 
mered Sonia,  growing  pale  with  sorrow-smitten 
heart. 

"  Upon  this  he  rose.  *  I  did  not  bow  to  you  per- 
sonally, but  to  suffering  humanity  in  your  person.' ' 

It  is  in  this  scene  that  Sonia  reads  to  Raskolnikov 
that  passage  from  the  Testament  in  which  faith 
maketh  a  man  whole.  And  it  is  here  Sonia  declares 
from  her  heart  the  need  for  a  murderer  to  repent. 
Long  after,  when  Raskolnikov  is  on  his  way  to  the 
police  to  give  himself  up,  he  remembers,  still  hard- 
hearted, the  words  of  Sonia. 

Having  got  to  the  centre  of  the  place,  the  young  man 
suddenly  recalled  Sonia's  words:  "Go  to  some  public 
place,  bow  to  the  crowd,  kiss  the  earth  you  have  soiled  by 
your  sin,  and  say  in  a  loud  voice,  in  the  presence  of  everyone: 
I  am  a  murderer."  At  the  recollection  of  this  he  trembled 

[  '83  ] 


in  every  limb.  The  anguish  of  the  last  few  days  had  hard- 
ened his  heart  to  such  an  extent  that  he  felt  satisfied  to  find 
himself  yet  open  to  feelings  of  another  kind,  and  gave  him- 
self entirely  up  to  this  one.  Sincere  sorrow  overpowered 
him,  his  eyes  filled  with  tears.  He  knelt  in  the  very  middle 
of  the  place,  bowed  earthwards,  and  joyfully  kissed  the  miry 
ground.  After  having  risen  he  knelt  down  once  more. 

"  There's  a  fellow  who  has  got  a  tile  loose,"  observed  a 
lad  standing  by.  This  observation  was  received  with  shouts 
and  laughter.  .  .  .  On  seeing  himself  the  object  of  general 
attention,  Raskolnikov  lost  his  self-possession  somewhat,  and 
the  words  "  I  have  killed,"  which  he  had  on  the  tip  of  his 
tongue,  died  away. 

Only  Dostoevsky  could  have  written  this,  an  irony 
which,  unlike  Anatole  France's,  is  not  a  smile  at  hu- 
manity, but  a  grave  understanding. 

The  fact  that  Crime  and  Punishment  has  a  moral 
for  those  animalculae  who  are  endued  only  with  in- 
tellect and  will  is  one  of  its  unexpected  disclosures. 
Not  till  half  the  book  is  read  is  the  Superman  idea 
introduced.  But  the  moral  of  Crime  and  Punish- 
ment would  be  nothing  if  it  were  not  a  novel  at  once 
fascinating  and  horrifying.  That  horror  could  so 
fascinate,  or  fascination  be  so  horrible,  is  one  of  the 
wonders  of  the  written  word. 

To  conclude  everything  as  to  Dostoevsky  from 
this  one  novel  would  be  fatuous,  but  it  is  at  least  pos- 
sible to  recognize  a  master,  one  of  the  few  great 
interpreters  of  man.  On  the  borderland  Dostoev- 
sky stands,  the  borderland  between  sanity  and  in- 
sanity, between  poverty  and  crime,  between  student 
life  and  the  underworld.  .There,  where  men  and 
women  flash  from  one  side  to  the  other  in  the  phan- 
tasmagoria of  passion  and  necessity,  Dostoevsky 

[  184] 


watches  with  intensity  and  yet  with  consummate  pa- 
tience. He  has  no  illusions  and  no  useless  pity.  He 
attempts  no  easy  pathos.  The  Crime,  at  which  so 
many  sympathies  halt  and  hearts  begin  to  harden, 
Dostoevsky  accepts  without  protest.  It  is  the  Pun- 
ishment that  awakens  his  soul,  and  as  the  flame  of 
the  inner  life  rises  and  falls  one  can  feel  the  heart 
of  Dostoevsky  beat  quicker,  believing  as  he  does  in 
the  forces  that  heal  as  well  as  wound. 

June  30,  1911. 


[  185  ] 


DRAMA  AND  THE  THEATRE,  i 


JOHN  SYNGE 

1  HE  monosyllable  Synge  will  convey  little  to  many 
American  readers.  In  Dublin,  where  the  dramatist 
died  last  March,  the  name  is  known  to  every  one. 
In  London,  where  his  plays  were  acted  frequently,  it 
is  known  at  least  to  the  cultivated  minority.  In 
Paris,  where  Synge  invited  his  soul  on  the  slopes 
where  so  many  lose  their  souls,  perhaps  a  few  do 
know  his  name  to-day.  It  was  uttered,  however 
strangely,  in  Prague,  where  one  of  his  shorter  plays 
was  given.  On  Inishmaan  and  Aranmor,  the  islets 
that  are  separated  from  Connemara  by  racing  seas, 
the  fishermen  will  still  think  of  the  man  they  called 
John,  who  now  lies  in  his  black  coffin,  never  to  talk 
to  them  again  in  that  low  rapid  voice  of  his,  or  laugh 
through  his  closed  teeth,  or  watch  in  his  silent  way 
with  fine  steady  gaze  as  they  went  on  with  their  manly 
work,  or  spoke  to  him  of  things  he  loved  to  hear, 
their  wills  and  their  desires,  and  their  colored 
dreams. 

Synge  was  not  38  when  he  died.  Up  to  1903  he 
was  unknown  as  a  writer  except  by  his  friend  Yeats. 
In  that  year  his  first  play  was  acted  in  Dublin,  and 
he  had  definitely  left  Paris,  where  Yeats  had  met 
him  and  drawn  him  to  thinking  of  the  Gaelic  he  had 
forgotten,  and  the  Irish  imagination  he  was  starving. 
Yeats  served  letters  the  day  he  turned  Synge  west. 

Poems  and  Translations,  by  John  Synge.    Luce,  Boston. 
[   I89  ] 


It  makes  one  wince  to  think  of  the  other  genius  that 
has  kept  astray — in  baffling  forests  of  life,  where 
the  branches  conceal  the  stars. 

Not  a  few  things  will  work  against  the  proper  un- 
derstanding of  Synge  here  in  America.  In  the  first 
place  his  dramas  are  not  published  in  America. 
Next  he  wrote  solely  of  the  Irish  people.  Again  his 
English  is  as  strange  as  it  is  beautiful.  Again  he  has 
been  blasphemed  by  stupid  patriots,  and  by  priests 
who  know  not  beauty  and  pervert  truth.  Finally, 
a  little  clique  is  likely  to  appropriate  him,  to  refer  to 
him  darkly  and  ecstatically,  and  to  make  of  him  a 
god  for  their  jealous  devotion. 

In  spite  of  these  things,  I  believe  that  Synge's 
fame  will  spread  wherever  English  is  spoken.  Men 
going  on  long  journeys  will  slip  into  their  satchel 
a  book  of  Synge's  that,  loving,  they  cannot  relinquish. 
I  believe  that  Ireland,  which  spat  upon  Synge  while 
he  lived,  will  exalt  him  at  last  as  she  has  exalted 
others  who  loved  her  without  being  able  to  senti- 
mentalize. And  I  am  sure  also  that  his  five  dramas 
will  come  to  be  more  and  more  familiar  in  the  the- 
atre, as  more  and  more  there  are  managers  who 
value  their  audiences,  and  audiences  who  value  them- 
selves. 

While  glancing  at  the  poems  and  translations  by 
Synge,  his  dramas  may  be  recalled.  The  common 
lingo  of  book  reviewing  is  not  worthy  of  these  joy- 
ous and  salty  plays.  We  are  accustomed  to  un- 
measured praise  of  the  Elizabethans.  Well,  here 
in  our  own  time  is  a  man  who  writes  English  as 
fresh,  as  unruly,  as  gorgeously  rhetorical,  as  fiercely 
dramatic,  as  the  miraculous  English  of  the  renais- 
sance. Leaf  came  before  bloom,  no  doubt.  There 

[  190  ] 


is  gray  as  well  as  cardinal  red  in  the  five  dramas  of 
Synge.  But  to  recede  from  his  work  and  look  back 
upon  it  is  to  behold  a  blaze  of  color,  prose  that  stands 
out  first  in  separate  sharp  patches,  like  an  impres- 
sionist masterpiece,  and  then  composes,  composes  dis- 
creetly, into  hues  not  all  brilliant,  but  tender  and 
vague  and  mournful,  the  mist  creeping  over  the  hills 
and  the  dusk  drooping  on  the  sea. 

If  one  has  an  impression  of  color  in  thinking  of 
The  Playboy,  The  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  The  Tinker's 
Wedding,  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  it  is  because  a 
primal  delight  is  in  them  all,  a  delight  of  image,  of 
figure,  of  poetry.  Sounds  —  the  sound  of  a  woman's 
low  voice,  the  cry  of  the  heron,  the  roaring  of  the 
rain  —  might  as  well  be  in  one's  mind,  or  touch  — 
waves  of  warmth  from  the  earth  in  spring,  the  soft 
air  of  evening  or  the  kiss  of  a  sweet  mouth.  What- 
ever the  impression  Synge  leaves,  it  is  beautifully 
sensuous,  not  merely  in  the  romantic  vision  he  sum- 
mons, but  more  contagiously  in  his  rhythms,  his  joy- 
ous or  plaintive  evocation. 

Mr.  Yeats  speaks  of  the  "  astringent  joy  and  hard- 
ness that  was  in  all  he  did,"  and  again  of  his  "  hunger 
for  harsh  facts,  for  ugly  surprising  things,  for  all 
that  defies  our  hope."  And  he  thinks  of  that  little 
poem  in  which  Synge,  after  looking  at  one  of  A.  E.'s 
pictures,  The  Passing  of  the  Shee,  was  "  repelled  by 
the  contemplation  of  a  beauty  too  far  from  life  to 
appease  his  mood  " : 

Adieu,  sweet  Angus,  Maeve  and  Fand, 
Ye  plumed  yet  skinny  Shee, 
That  poets  played  with  hand  in  hand 
To  learn  their  ecstasy. 

[  191  3 


We'll  stretch  in  Red  Dan  Sally's  ditch, 
And  drink  in  Tubber  fair, 
Or  poach  with  Red  Dan  Philly's  bitch 
The  badger  or  the  hare. 

Synge  did,  indeed,  find  little  reality  for  himself  in 
the  dim  goddesses  of  Yeats,  les  belles  dames  sans 
merci.  Like  Yeats,  he  felt  the  wrong  of  unsightly 
things,  and,  like  Yeats,  he  hated  the  timid,  the  banal 
and  the  sordid  life  of  our  modern  bourgeoisie.  But 
Synge's  passionate  desire  was  for  poetry  in  the  life 
about  him,  poetry  that  he  could  feel  and  hear 
and  see.  Not  by  a  seclusion  and  exaltation  of  his 
nature  could  he  be  satisfied,  but  by  the  energetic  dis- 
charge of  his  thought,  the  expression  of  his  exuber- 
ant fantasy,  the  reaction  in  drama  of  all  the  emotions 
which  flourish  in  man,  never  to  be  admonished  by 
the  moralist  in  view,  but  to  be  proportioned  by  irony, 
by  satire,  by  the  ringing  laughter  of  Rabelais. 

In  the  preface  to  The  Playboy,  speaking  of  reality, 
"  which  is  the  root  of  all  poetry,"  Synge  made  this 
significant  criticism: 

In  the  modern  literature  of  towns,  however,  richness  is 
found  only  in  sonnets,  or  prose  poems,  or  in  one  or  two 
elaborate  books  that  are  far  away  from  the  profound  and 
common  interests  of  life.  One  has,  on  one  side,  Mallarme 
and  Huysmans  producing  this  literature;  and,  on  the  other, 
Ibsen  and  Zola  dealing  with  the  reality  of  life  in  joyless 
and  pallid  words.  On  the  stage  one  must  have  reality,  and 
must  have  joy;  and  that  is  why  the  intellectual  modern 
drama  has  failed,  and  people  have  grown  sick  of  the  false 
joy  of  the  musical  comedy  that  has  been  given  them  in  place 
of  the  rich  joy  found  only  in  what  is  superb  and  wild  in 
reality. 

[  193  ] 


Now,  while  Synge  believed  that  "  there  is  no  one 
timber  that  has  not  strong  roots  among  the  clay 
and  worms,"  this  does  not  seem  to  me  to  imply  that 
he  hungered  for  harsh  facts.  Ibsen  and  Zola,  whose 
words  were  surely  not  pallid,  did  hunger  for  harsh 
facts  with  the  hunger  that  drove  other  men  to  locusts 
and  wild  honey.  But  Synge  was  a  romantic.  He 
believed  in  "  what  is  superb  and  wild  in  reality." 
Being  at  the  opposite  pole  to  the  fat  and  rosy  Irish- 
man of  the  Thomas  Moore  order,  he  could  not  in- 
clude anything  in  his  romance  that  did  not  suffer  his 
brooding  imagination  and  his  personal  experience. 
When  he  sang  of  queens,  of  Etain,  Helen,  Maeve 
and  Fand,  "  Queens  of  Sheba,  Meath  and  Con- 
naught,"  it  was  to  turn  to  the  woman  he  loved, 

saying: 

i 

"  Yet  these  are  rotten  —  I  ask  their  pardon 
And  we've  the  sun  on  rock  or  garden, 
These  are  rotten,  so  you're  the  queen 
Of  all  are  living,  or  have  been." 

Is  this  mordant?  On  the  contrary,  it  is  fiercely 
vigorous  and  healthy.  Synge  knew  the  irony  of  fate, 
the  falsity  of  dreams,  the  vanity  of  vanities.  Yet 
this  knowledge  disgusted  him  not  with  life,  but  with 
the  curmudgeons  of  life;  and  he  took  his  joy  not 
in  belaboring  fate  or  annulling  dreams,  but  in  ob- 
serving with  frank  delight  or  frank  stoicism  the 
dance  of  life,  merry,  grotesque  or  mournful,  accord- 
ing to  the  music  of  circumstance. 

Synge  said  once  that  the  drama,  like  the  symphony, 
does  not  teach  or  prove  anything.  And  contemn- 
ing the  plays  that  have  one  sort  of  propaganda  or 
another,  he  spoke  joyously  of  the  best  plays  of  Ben 

[  193  ] 


Jonson  and  Moliere,  that  "  can  no  more  go  out  of 
fashion  than  the  blackberries  on  the  hedges."  Be- 
ing so  little  anxious  to  prescribe  for  the  revolution 
in  the  soul  of  man,  Synge  is  in  danger  of  being 
underestimated  by  people  who  expect  drama  to  be  a 
"  criticism  of  life,"  and  want  to  leave  the  theatre 
saying:  "  And  the  moral  of  that  is  .  .  ."  He  takes 
no  account  of  such  shocking  morality,  such  prurient 
idealism. 

Yet  I  do  not  feel  that  there  is  anything  unreal,  or 
unconcerned  about  the  women  and  men  in  Synge's 
plays.  In  their  lives,  as  in  yours  and  mine,  there 
are  hard  material  conditions,  and  if  they  were  wise 
with  the  wisdom  of  this  "  age  of  reasons  and  pur- 
poses "  they  would  give  us  pointers  on  the  conserva- 
tion of  national  resources,  the  municipalization  of 
street  railways,  the  sterilization  of  habitual  crim- 
inals. But  Synge  has  found  little  of  wild  and  superb 
reality  in  these  estimable  topics.  Instead,  he  writes 
a  little  play  like  The  Shadow  of  the  Glen  that  has 
not  an  opinion  in  it,  nor  a  purpose  in  it,  nothing  but 
the  emotions  of  everyday  living,  the  thoughts  of  a 
woman  on  growing  old,  the  gray  lonesome  thoughts 
of  a  fine  woman  married  to  a  wheezy  old  man,  the 
angry  and  painful  thoughts  of  the  old  man,  the  words 
of  a  callow  lover  who  thinks  he  owns  the  woman, 
the  words  of  a  tramp  who  paints  for  her,  in  words 
that  sing  with,  the  beauty  and  illusion  of  freedom, 
the  "  grand  evening  "  of  the  happy  wanderer,  and 
the  fine  songs  she'll  be  hearing  when  the  sun 
goes  up. 

You  may  read  that  play  twenty  times,  and  you  will 
find  that  it  wears  like  gold.  It  is  a  marvelous  play, 
with  fierce  humor,  gallantry  of  image,  pungent  real- 

[  194  J 


ism.  Here  is  the  wild  and  superb  reality  of  our 
common  nature,  with  nothing  to  show  it  off  in  the 
lonely  farmer's  cottage  at  the  head  of  a  long  glen, 
where  all  one  sees  are  "  the  mists  rolling  down  the 
bog,  and  the  mists  again,  and  they  rolling  up  the 
bog." 

The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World  is  a  play  so 
unexpected  in  action,  so  racy  in  idiom,  so  perplexing 
in  its  first  paradox  of  the  murderer  honored  and  re- 
spected, so  satisfying  in  its  final  revelation  of  laugh- 
able, vain,  miserable,  heroic  human  nature,  that  to 
discuss  it  in  a  cursory  manner  is  neither  tempting 
nor  fitting. 

It  is  a  play  in  which  Mr.  Yeats  sees  the  general 
characteristics  of  all  Synge's  plays,  wherein  person 
after  person  is  "  the  like  of  the  little  children  do  be 
listening  to  the  stories  of  an  old  woman,  and  do  be 
after  dreaming  in  the  dark  night  it  is  in  grand  houses 
of  gold  they  are,  with  speckled  horses  to  ride,  and 
do  be  waking  again  in  a  short  while  and  they  de- 
stroyed with  the  cold,  and  the  thatch  dripping,  maybe, 
and  the  starved  ass  braying  in  the  yard."  This  is 
the  truth  of  all  of  them,  and  yet  Synge  did  not  send 
his  planet  through  space  to  the  tune  of  the  bray- 
ing ass. 

Riders  to  the  Sea  is  tragedy,  bitter,  sorrowful,  re- 
signed, dignified.  The  Well  of  the  Saints  is  ca- 
cophonous, perhaps,  but  The  Tinker's  Wedding  is 
splendid  fun,  a  beautifully  veracious  version  of  the 
Irish  tinkers,  a  grand  tribe  of  characters,  full  of 
ribald  gayety  and  blasphemy,  superstitious,  irregular 
and  verging  on  the  criminal,  no  respecters  of  per- 
sons, their  own  least  of  all.  To  enjoy  them,  as  they 
plot  and  lie  and  squabble,  may  seem  fearfully  aban- 

[  195  ] 


doned,   but  whatever   prevents   one   enjoying  The 
Tinker's  Wedding  is  essentially  evil. 

The  romance  which  Synge  found  in  life,  however, 
is  best  expressed  in  the  endings  of  The  Playboy  and 
of  The  Shadow  in  the  Glen,  endings  on  the  upward 
wing,  with  certainly  a  swoop  downward,  but  with 
a  hope  of  love  and  of  power  that  are  proof  of  the 
invincible  Gael. 

How  invincible  was  Synge  personally  is  to  be 
learned  in  this  last  book,  Poems  and  Translations, 
a  handful  of  verse  and  prose  which  Mr.  Yeats  has 
prefaced  with  a  touching  comment  on  the  man  and 
his  work.  Synge  knew  he  had  been  dying  for 
months,  but  he  spoke  to  no  one  except  his  betrothed. 
"  He  was  a  solitary,  undemonstrative  man,  never 
asking  pity,  nor  complaining,  nor  seeking  sympathy, 
but  in  this  Book's  momentary  cries;  all  folded  up  in 
his  brooding  intellect,  knowing  nothing  of  new 
books  and  newspapers,  reading  the  great  masters 
alone." 

How  well  Synge  realized  himself,  this  book  is 
final  proof.  The  man  gave  nothing  that  was  not 
himself,  either  in  the  things  he  spoke  of  or  the  way 
he  spoke  of  them.  He  had  technique,  excellently 
applied,  but  his  one  purpose  was  to  further  the  ex- 
pression of  that  keen,  critical,  ironical,  humorous 
and  impossibly  romantic  creature  who  hated  shams, 
hated  compromises,  but  loved  reality  whether  it  came 
in  vagrants  or  tinkers,  in  a  lonely  farmer  woman  in 
the  hills,  or  a  fine  girl  in  a  Mayo  shebeen. 

In  his  translations  of  Petrarch  Synge  has  per- 
formed the  miracle.  His  own  poems  have  no  more 
vitality  than  these  heart-breaking  poems  rendered  in 
the  prose  of  an  Irish  countryman. 

[  196  ] 


Whatever  the  desolate  woman  or  man  may  miss 
of  humanity  in  the  other  Irish  writings  of  to-day, 
there  is  in  Synge  unending  humanity.  The  idiom  is 
foreign  to  most.  The  imagery  leaps  and  startles 
like  flame.  But  the  deep  spirit  of  a  man  has  gone 
into  this  work,  and  those  who  read  with  the  spirit 
will  know  it. 

July  2,  /pop, 


[  197] 


SHAW  ON  MARRIAGE 

1  HE  last  person  in  the  world  to  take  Getting  Mar- 
ried seriously  as  a  drama  would  be  Bernard  Shaw 
himself.  He  knows  that  his  name  at  last  arouses 
joyous  expectation  in  a  large  American  public,  and 
he  is  probably  human  enough  to  be  gratified  that 
Getting  Married  has  had  an  excellent  New  York 
run.  But  there  can  be  few  of  his  achievements  in 
the  theatre  about  which  he  has  smaller  illusion  than 
this  same  manipulation  of  dialectic.  In  other  plays 
he  has  been  really  interested  in  the  people  he  created. 
He  has  given  them  some  chance  to  have  an  accent 
of  their  own,  and  to  behave  spontaneously.  Here, 
except  for  Mrs.  George  and  perhaps  the  bishop,  he 
shows  little  interest  in  his  characters  as  persons. 
They  are  mouthpieces,  and  subservient  mouthpieces 
at  that.  They  have  one  excuse  for  appearing  in  the 
"  action  "  and  one  function  when  they  are  present 
on  the  stage,  to  spout  about  marriage.  They  have 
no  other  reason  for  being.  If  the  events  of  the  play 
provided  such  enormous  pressure  that  one's  atten- 
tion could  not  wander  from  marriage  any  more  than 
one's  attention  at  Ghosts  can  wander  from  heredity, 
Getting  Married  could  be  regarded  as  a  drama.  But 
the  only  solid  compulsion  in  the  play  is  the  compul- 
sion worked  by  the  inclusively  argumentative  author. 
Mr.  Shaw  was  never  so  little  occupied  in  suggesting 
a  specific  dilemma  that  depended  on  idiosyncrasy,  or 

[  198  J 


so  much  occupied  in  discussing  an  institution.  To 
engage  people's  minds  by  the  sheer  vivacity  of  his 
discussion  seemed  to  him  the  thing  worth  doing. 
And  he  made  no  serious  effort  to  do  anything  else. 

The  trouble  with  a  play  so  disputatious  is  the 
trouble  with  all  purposeful  documents.  It  is  the 
purpose  that  is  fascinating,  and  there  is  no  fun  in 
the  processes  once  the  purpose  is  accomplished.  So 
long  as  one  has  the  purblind  conventions  that  Mr. 
Shaw  seeks  to  undermine  in  Getting  Married,  there 
is  considerable  excitement  in  the  scheme  and  plot  of 
his  proposals.  Then  it  is  really  thrilling  that  a 
woman  like  Lesbia  can  want  children  without  want- 
ing a  husband,  that  a  woman  like  Leo  can  want  a 
lover  without  wanting  to  give  up  a  husband,  that  a 
woman  like  Edith  can  want  a  husband  without  want- 
ing to  give  up  free  speech.  But  once  these  impulses 
have  been  accepted  beforehand  and  one's  mind  has 
dwelt  on  them,  the  flinty  opposition  on  which  Mr. 
Shaw  must  count  for  his  steely  spark  is  absent,  and 
there  is  little  in  the  drama  except  the  equation  of 
the  personalities  involved.  Of  course  one  may  say 
that  it  is  the  vitality  of  Mr.  Shaw's  ideas,  not  their 
novelty,  that  justifies  Getting  Married,  and  that  so 
long  as  such  prejudices  as  the  ones  he  is  encountering 
are  viable,  his  exposure  of  them  is  bound  to  have 
verve.  That  assumes  he  really  has  exposed  preju- 
dices, not  tried  to  titillate  his  audience  with  a  facile 
perception  of  them.  For  myself,  he'd  have  to  re- 
veal a  much  stronger  feeling  about  the  whole  busi- 
ness of  institutionalized  sex  than  Getting  Married 
exhibits  to  make  his  witticism  about  marriage  do 
more  than  seem  rather  mildly  tickling.  In  1908, 
perhaps,  the  public  skin  was  thinner  and  his  point 

[  199  ] 


sharper.  That  is  the  unfortunate  part  of  his  long 
indulgence  as  the  spoiled  Irish  tag-player  among 
bumbling  Philistines. 

It  is  perfectly  all  right  for  Mr.  Shaw  to  have 
his  characters  "  talking  all  over  the  shop,"  but  either 
the  quality  of  their  talk  ought  to  be  better  or  it  ought 
to  be  representative  of  persons  in  a  plight  more 
related  to  love.  The  plight  of  Cecil  and  Edith  is, 
of  course,  a  facetious  one.  On  their  wedding  morn- 
ing they  start  reading  pamphlets  —  he  on  a  man's 
legal  liability  for  his  wife  and  she  on  the  laws  of 
divorce.  It  is  amusing,  but  it  requires  an  enormous 
spirit  to  carry  it  off,  and  there  is  nothing  in  the 
bishop's  daughter  or  the  young  man  who  plans  to 
marry  her  to  make  their  feelings  or  reasonings  par- 
ticularly poignant.  It  is,  however,  the  twists  to  the 
discussion  that  remind  one  of  Mr.  Shaw's  amazing 
capacity  for  groundling  wit.  '  This  is  not  quarrel- 
ling, Lesbia;  it  is  only  English  family  life."  "  Go 
and  get  married  first:  you'll  have  plenty  of  arguing 
afterwards,  miss,  believe  me."  "  Lord  bless  you, 
ma'am,  I'm  that  fond  of  old  Matilda  that  I  never 
tell  her  anything  at  all  for  fear  of  hurting  her  feel- 
ings." These  are  the  kind  of  mediaeval,  even  ar- 
boreal, jests  that  one  gets  a  little  tired  of.  And  one 
needs  a  real  conviction  as  to  sincere  characteriza- 
tion before  one  can  enjoy  the  young  lady  who  keeps 
asking:  "Have  you  worn  your  liver  pad?" 
"  Have  you  rubbed  your  head  with  the  lotion  every 
night?" 

As  a  shameless  playwright,  Mr.  Shaw  knows  that 
these  lines  are  laugh-getters,  and  he  knows  it  is  ex- 
pedient to  pick  up  laughs.  That  is  not  in  itself  a 
monstrosity,  but  a  play  has  to  be  extremely  witty  to 

[  200  ] 


redeem  such  witticism.  For  all  its  exhibition  of 
conventional  inconsistency  and  pretense  and  mind- 
lessness,  Getting  Married  is  hardly  the  play. 

Mrs.  George  is  a  thrilling  person.  "  Her  beauty 
is  wrecked,  like  an  ageless  landscape  ravaged  by 
long  and  fierce  war.  Her  eyes  are  alive,  arresting 
and  haunting;  and  there  is  still  a  turn  of  delicate 
beauty  and  pride  in  her  indomitable  chin;  but  her 
cheeks  are  wasted  and  lined,  her  mouth  writhen  and 
piteous.  The  whole  face  is  a  battlefield  of  the  pas- 
sions, quite  deplorable  until  she  speaks,  when  an 
alert  sense  of  fun  rejuvenates  her  in  a  moment,  and 
makes  her  company  irresistible."  A  play  that  lived 
up  to  Mrs.  George,  and  kept  the  discussion  of  mar- 
riage in  the  hands  of  persons  worth  considering, 
would  have  had  greatness.  As  it  is,  Mrs.  George 
provides  a  moment  of  greatness  in  her  intranced 
speech.  Mr.  Shaw  is  not  a  poet.  His  rhetoric  is 
always  the  rhetoric  of  noble  intention  rather  than 
inspiration.  It  is  built,  not  born.  But  there  is 
beauty  and  valor  in  every  line  of  that  rhapsodic 
utterance  —  "  When  you  loved  me  I  gave  you  the 
whole  sun  and  stars  to  play  with.  I  gave  you  eter- 
nity in  a  single  moment,  strength  of  the  mountains 
in  one  clasp  of  your  arms,  and  the  volume  of  all 
the  seas  in  one  impulse  of  your  souls.  A  moment 
only;  but  was  it  not  enough?  "  If  Mr.  Shaw  rises 
by  climbing,  he  never  rose  to  a  greater  height. 

On  this  summit  Getting  Married  does  not  stand. 
Mr.  Faversham  and  Mr.  Cherry  and,  in  some  ways, 
Miss  Grossman,  did  better  by  their  author  than  any 
playgoer  was  likely  to  expect.  But  the  total  result 
was  decidedly  short  of  happiness.  What  is  happi- 
ness to  a  propagandist  like  Mr.  Shaw?  He  ex- 

[  201  1 


pressly  disavows  happiness  as  a  decent  human  con- 
sideration in  that  magnificent  preface  to  Getting 
Married  which  says  so  much  more  than  the  play. 
He  may  be  right  about  matrimonial  happiness,  but 
about  theatrical  he  is  dangerously  wrong,  and  play- 
goers can  fairly  blame  him  for  not  having  deepened 
his  characters  or  heightened  his  wit. 

February  IT,  1917. 


t  203 


TIME  CANNOT  WITHER? 

A  MAN  so  virtuous  as  Bernard  Shaw  is  entitled 
to  one  incontinence,  but  the  lifelong  habit  of  debating 
societies  has  finally  gone  to  his  head.  In  Getting 
Married  there  were  parentheses  and  divergences  and 
footnotes  —  that  play  was  as  chaste  as  the  Parthe- 
non compared  with  the  diffuse  Misalliance.  It  ap- 
peared sufficiently  long,  Misalliance,  when  one  read 
it.  The  Faversham  production  at  the  Broadhurst 
Theatre  shows  how  much  the  eye  is  quicker  than  the 
ear.  It  is  a  powerful  long  performance  to  sit 
through,  and  during  it  Mr.  Shaw  shrinks  several 
sizes  in  the  estimate  of  normally  patient  men. 

It  is  an  amusing  production.  Mr.  Maclyn  Ar- 
buckle  in  particular  raises  a  gale  of  refreshing  laugh- 
ter as  soon  as  he  enters,  and  his  performance  as  the 
great  Tarleton  of  Tarleton's  Underwear  goes  far 
to  make  the  evening  hilarious.  But  subtract  Mr. 
Arbuckle,  fix  attention  on  the  wily  and  nefarious 
dramatist  behind  him,  and  one  soon  realizes  how 
much  one  is  being  nourished  on  wind.  The  play 
is  shamelessly  self-indulgent,  an  orgy  on  the  part  of 
a  man  who  neither  drinks,  smokes  nor  chews.  Bet- 
ter for  us  if  Bernard  Shaw  were  as  wild  as  the  Yelr- 
low  Book  wanted  to  be,  and  kept  for  his  own  laxities, 
in  Misalliance  the  eye  that  he  actually  had  for  vacr 
cinators  and  eaters  of  shrimps  and  prawns. 

It  is  all  very  well  to  urge  that  discursiveness  is 
quite  possible  under  the  guise  of  drama,  and  that 

[  203  ] 


the  mind  may  be  engaged  and  satisfied  by  the  lively 
development  of  pregnant  ideas.  Something  else  is 
bound  to  be  expected,  if  the  situation  that  starts  the 
discussion  is  an  emotional  situation  and  the  partici- 
pants in  it  look  like  actual  men  and  women.  For 
the  convenience  of  the  insuppressibly  argumentative, 
it  is  necessary  to  suppose  that  every  one  has  a  special 
line  of  conduct  and  is  perfectly  aware  of  it  and  is 
enormously  articulate  about  it  and  is  engaged  in  dis- 
cussing it  a  large  part  of  the  day.  This  assumption, 
so  suitable  for  the  ventilation  of  ideas,  is  hopelessly 
incompatible  with  the  state  of  mind  that  a  dramatic 
situation  actually  begets  in  the  man  at  a  play.  What 
one  demands  in  a  play,  knowingly  or  unknowingly, 
is  the  conviction  that  the  situation  is  genuine  to  its 
participants,  and  if  the  situation  is  genuine  one  ex- 
pects a  chemistry  of  mood  and  circumstance  that  has 
an  emotional  outcome,  satisfying  the  mind  that  has 
been  engaged  by  the  issue  but  also  satisfying  the 
heart  that,  in  genuine  drama,  is  the  partner  of  mind. 
Misalliance  is  unfortunately  farcical  in  its  contempt 
of  such  obligations.  It  makes  every  one  in  the  play 
an  exponent  of  a  cause  rather  than  an  element  in  a 
vital  chemistry,  and  what  is  developed  is  not  a  drama 
but  a  series  of  arguments,  a  display  of  ideas  rather 
than  a  display  of  their  signification. 

What  could  be  more  superficially  comic  than  the 
juxtaposition  of  fastidious  Summerhays  and  the  ir- 
reverent Hypatia?  Or  the  linking  of  romantic  old 
Tarleton  and  the  pragmatic  Lina  Szczepanowska? 
Or  the  contrast  of  young  Summerhays,  a  male  who 
keeps  his  end  up  by  crying  and  screaming,  and  Lina, 
a  female  who  possesses  the  sort  of  physical  courage 
that  is  supposed  to  go  with  comb  and  spurs?  But 

[  204  ] 


the  fertile  invention  of  Bernard  Shaw  is  not  taxed 
to  arouse  anything  but  this  easy  amusement  at  his 
combinations  and  collisions  and  contrasts.  No 
emotion  in  the  farce,  not  that  of  Tarleton  senior  or 
Tarleton  junior  for  Lina,  or  that  of  Summerhays 
senior  or  Summerhays  junior  for  Hypatia,  or  that  of 
Hypatia  for  Percival  or  Percival  for  Hypatia,  has 
any  employment  except  to  promote  amusing  com- 
ment. And  the  greatest  ardor  of  all,  the  ardor  of 
Gunner  to  murder  John  Tarleton,  is  grasped  as  a 
supreme  chance  to  turn  a  laugh. 

If  the  ideas  of  Misalliance  were  fresh,  one  might 
be  content  to  assume  that  drama  as  one  long  oppor- 
tunity for  opinion.  The  staleness,  the  pleasant  and 
friendly  staleness,  of  much  of  its  material,  is  enough 
to  exclude  that  possibility.  PercivaFs  willingness  to 
bully  the  clerk  as  a  matter  of  honor  is  a  happy  touch 
of  satire  in  an  excellent  scene.  Mrs.  Tarleton's 
practical  attitude  toward  her  husband's  polygamy  and 
her  diverting  notions  of  the  aristocracy  are  new  ele- 
ments in  that  humane  maternalism  to  which  the  dram- 
atist is  so  well  disposed.  But  Hypatia's  assault  on 
Percival,  Johnny  Broadbent  Tarleton's  literalness, 
the  physical  cowardice  of  Summerhays,  all  suggest 
that  Misalliance  was  made  from  chips  that  littered 
the  dramatist's  workshop.  And  this  lack  of  novelty 
fixes  attention  on  the  perfunctory  nature  of  the 
drama,  especially  on  the  sacrifice  of  its  development 
to  the  immediate  theatre-laugh. 

It  is  a  theatre-laugh,  for  example,  that  Gunner 
earns.  The  seduction  of  his  mother  may  or  may  not 
have  been  a  joke,  but  Mr.  Shaw  plants  the  poor  idiot 
so  that  he  is  merely  ludicrous,  regardless  of  his 
mother's  death  and  everything  else.  So  it  is  a  thea- 

[  205  ] 


tre-laugh,  not  a  laugh  of  corrective  comedy,  that  at- 
tends every  suggestion  of  love  in  Misalliance.  A 
man  in  love  is  no  more  laughable,  really,  than  a  man 
in  a  gas-mask.  His  appearance  may  be  silly,  but 
the  question  is,  what  is  creating  the  appearance  ?  To 
laugh  at  the  grotesque  intensity  of  him  is  to  behave 
like  a  child.  Yet  Mr.  Shaw  continues  to  parody  the 
appearances  of  love  and  to  make  them  the  material 
of  his  farce. 

It  is  a  little  hard  on  Shaw  to  blame  him  for  such 
relaxed  behavior.  No  one  has  become  so  serenely 
at  home  with  the  theatre  public  or  is  allowed  to 
saunter  with  such  informality  among  idols.  He  may 
sit  on  the  floor  where  other  people  sit  on  chairs,  may 
enter  souls  without  knocking  and  leave  without  leave- 
taking,  and  each  touch  of  his  familiar  imusualness 
is  happily  anticipated  and  recognized.  There  is  a 
certain  responsibility  on  his  side,  indeed,  to  meet 
these  expectations  of  his  public.  He  would  be  pain- 
fully disappointing  if  his  characters  did  not  jump 
through  paper  rings  or  hang  their  hats  on  the  intel- 
lectual gas.  But  while  the  luxury  of  prattle  is  eager- 
ly permitted  to  him  by  scores  and  hundreds  of  audi- 
tors, including  every  English-speaking  critic,  it  is 
absurd  not  to  regret  that  he  is  luxuriating,  taking  his 
ease  in  disporting  rather  than  exercising  his  gifts. 
While  the  struggle  was  on,  he  tried  harder.  Now 
that  it  is  won,  he  has  dropped  the  discipline  of  self- 
criticism  and  lets  his  quick-silver  mind  run  loose. 
The  penalty  is  not  apparent.  He  fills  theatres  as  he 
never  filled  them  in  his  heyday.  His  audiences  know 
when  to  laugh,  if  not  when  to  think.  But  there  is  a 
penalty  in  the  end. 

In  the  mossy  corners  of  America,  where  pride  is 
[  206  ] 


synonymous  with  tradition  and  heads  are  moulded 
to  lit  the  metal  of  inheritance,  the  name  of  Shaw  is 
still  distasteful  and  a  little  alarming.  A  charlatan, 
he  is  still  called,  a  mountebank,  a  jackanapes,  but 
the  substance  of  his  offense  to  the  ancien  regime  of 
Brooklyn  and  Hartford  and  Orange  and  Boston  is 
what  they  regard  as  his  smart  irreverence.  And 
wherever  there  is  the  habit  of  reverence  and  the  creed 
of  authority,  as  to  property  or  family  or  love  or 
seniority  or  government  or  taboo,  the  tone  of  Shaw 
has  earned  a  persisting  resentment.  To  give  com- 
fort to  such  people  by  dispraising  a  great  man  would 
be  lamentable,  but  the  dispraise  is  chiefly  because  he 
is  becoming  less  deadly  to  the  enemy.  It  is  his  sea- 
son of  mists  and  mellow  fruitfulness,  and  in  this 
autumnal  drama  there  is  less  fruitfulness  than  mist. 

October  6, 


[  207  ] 


a  general  rule  one  does  not  ask  how  a  new  play 
reveals  a  personality.  One  goes  further  back  and 
asks  with  considerable  heat  whether  it  has  any  per- 
sonality to  reveal.  That,  fortunately,  is  the  kind 
of  skepticism  one  can  drop  in  dealing  with  J.  M. 
Barrie.  One  can  revel  in  his  positive  acclimatiza- 
tion as  a  dramatist.  He  is  not  a  man  so  unversed 
in  the  language  of  the  theatre  that  he  is  driven  to 
hackneyed  situations  and  conventions  and  platitudes. 
The  play  is  his  suitable,  mastered  medium.  He  does 
not  work  at  it,  but  in  it.  He  is  no  more  hampered 
by  the  theatre  than  Caruso  or  William  Jennings 
Bryan  by  their  singing  voice. 

Because  he  has  such  idiosyncrasy  as  a  dramatist, 
has  so  managed  to  effectuate  his  qualities,  the  good 
knight  James  dissuades  a  fair  number  of  people. 
They  do  not  believe  in  fairies,  thank  you.  They  do 
not  like  him.  He  gets  over  to  them  only  too  well. 
A  good  deal  of  this  comes  into  the  criticism  of  A 
Kiss  for  Cinderella,  especially  in  its  Miss  Maude 
Adams  version.  It  fails  not  because  it  is  A  Kiss  for 
Cinderella,  but  because  it  is  Barrie,  too  much  Bar- 
rie, for  a  quite  reputable  kind  of  taste.  There  are 
others  who  like  Barrie  but  think  he  is  not  at  his  best 
in  this  creation.  It  is  thin,  they  feel,  hasn't  the  gimp 
the  earlier  plays  had,  hasn't  the  earlier  spice  and 
ginger.  They  see,  or  profess  to  see,  a  real  falling- 
off. 

[  208  ] 


Dramatists  do  fall  off,  of  course.  Pygmalion 
limped  for  Shaw,  and  Percy  Mackaye  has  pecked  at 
a  fence  or  two.  Henry  Arthur  Jones  has  moved 
steadily  down.  But  one  has  to  be  suspicious  of  the 
oracular  cuss  who  takes  a  dramatist's  pulse  and  al- 
ways shakes  his  head.  He  may  be  discovering  a 
regular  condition,  not  a  crisis.  He  may  have  for- 
gotten his  patient's  constitutional  alienation  from 
norm.  Personally  I  do  not  think  this  "  fancy  "  of 
Barrie's  is  as  happy  as  Peter  Pan,  which  I  pretended 
to  love  but  never  returned  to.  I  do  not  think,  for 
one  thing,  that  it  has  the  same  degree  of  inspiration, 
the  same  airy  independence  of  fact.  The  first  act 
of  Cinderella,  for  example,  is  like  the  preliminary 
clucking  of  an  aeroplane  before  it  even  trills  along 
the  ground  to  start  flying.  It  is  vibration  without 
compensatory  motion.  It  is  just  a  little  dull.  But 
when  Cinderella  does  get  started  it  becomes  Barrie, 
Barrie  in  what  the  newspapers  call  his  "  whimsy," 
Barrie  in  his  essential  infantility  of  attitude.  And 
the  last  act,  after  the  prepotent  "  fancy,"  has  its  fa- 
miliar sickabed-lady  lyricism.  If  Barrie  isn't  like 
that,  what  is  he  like? 

Your  attitude  toward  this  man's  genius  depends 
altogether,  I  should  imagine,  on  your  general  atti- 
tude toward  heaven.  If  you  believe  in  heaven,  the 
peculiar  kind  of  child's  heaven  that  is  Barrie's,  you 
find  it  easy  to  lend  yourself  to  him,  to  his  general 
wistfulness  and  shy  sensibility  and  hazel-twig  gift 
for  nostalgia.  You  find  it  easy,  in  this  particular 
instance,  to  follow  Miss  Thing  in  wartime  London, 
the  naive  Scottish  maid  in  the  studio  by  day,  being 
cute  about  Venus  de  Milo  and  pathetic  in  the  eyes 
of  her  employer;  and  finding  pathos  at  night  herself 

[  209  ] 


in  services  for  the  poor  who  visit  her  shop,  and  in 
services  for  the  children  who  perch  in  packing-cases 
all  about  her.  As  tailor  and  doctor  and  barber  Miss 
Thing  earns  her  pennies,  a  symbol  to  London  of  the 
exigencies  of  her  wartime,  and  she  spends  her  pen- 
nies caring  for  the  refugees  (one  of  them  a  Gretchen, 
God  bless  Cinderella's  'eart).  It  is  to  please  the 
children  that  Miss  Thing  plays  Cinderella,  plays  it 
out  in  the  street  waiting  for  her  Prince,  as  she  con- 
fides to  the  policeman;  and  gets  pneumonia  and  her 
'Dream,  and  recovers  to  have  the  policeman  speak 
poetry  without  knowing  it  and  make  the  dream  come 
true. 

Although  it  is  with  humor  that  Barrie  sees  his 
policeman,  humor  as  to  his  pompous  idiom  and  his 
romance  so  pawkily  enjoyed  by  Cinderella,  the  full 
humor  of  the  play  is  in  the  fairy  dream.  Miss 
Thing  sees  herself  arriving  late  at  the  ball,  of  course, 
and  triumphantly  chosen  by  her  prince-policeman 
over  the  beautiful  Carmencitas  and  Mona  Lisas 
reminiscent  of  the  studio.  She  also  sees  a  lovely 
Maxfield  Parrish  background  for  King  and  Queen 
and  Lord  Times  and  the  lord  mayor.  But  the  Bar- 
rie touch  is  the  Cockney  tone  of  the  court  that  Miss 
Thing  is  projecting,  a  cuteness  with  laughter  in  it  at 
every  turn.  The  music  is  as  Cockney  as  the  lingo. 
It  is  a  glorification  of  hurdy-gurdy  and  gives  the  ball 
a  hilarity  that  would  be  coster  hilarity  if  Miss  Adams 
could  unbend  as  miraculously  as  she  strops  a  razor. 
This  humor  saves  Barrie's  tenderness  from  the  ex- 
tremities to  which  it  leans. 

On  those  extremities  depend,  however,  the  legiti- 
macy of  J.  M.  Barrie's  inspiration.  For  the  ten- 
derness that  suffuses  him  is  the  tenderness  of  a  spe- 

[  210  ] 


cial  romance  to-  which  Anglo-Saxons  as  a  rule  are 
early  inured.  Few  grown  persons  of  my  own  ac- 
quaintance take  any  great  stock  in  heaven,  but  when 
they  were  little  all  of  them  believed  in  it,  not  be- 
cause they  were  told  to  so  much  as  because  they  were 
able.  They  found  life  different  from  their  childish 
dream.  In  childhood,  in  other  words,  one  might 
still  believe  in  heaven  because  one  still  might  take 
experience  in  a  wondrous  heavenly  way.  One  woke 
early  on  a  Christmas  morning  to  a  world  where  there 
were  no  chores  or  chidings  at  the  moment,  where 
there  were  to  be  many  surprises,  but  all  of  them 
pleasant,  where  the  promise  was  to  have  a  swift  and 
merry  performance,  where  one  could  count  on  a 
warm  fire  in  the  breakfast-room  and  a  warm  glow  in 
the  parental  heart.  Those  were  golden  mornings, 
mornings  of  a  world  unified  and  indescribably  benign, 
and  one  revelled  in  the  expectancies  they  realized. 
It  was  before  one  began  to  emphasize  the  shatter- 
ing question,  Why  don't  the  wheels  go  round? 

In  convalescence  in  later  life,  to  cite  a  common 
experience,  there  can  be  a  similar  unity.  At  such  a 
time,  particularly  if  one  have  an  attractive  nurse,  the 
universe  comes  into  tune.  Lying  in  the  sanctified 
irresponsibility  of  the  sick-bed,  flowers  to  the  right 
of  us,  flowers  to  the  left  of  us,  all  the  creases  seem 
gradually  to  smooth  out.  Serene  in  emancipation, 
one  falls  into  sweet,  mild,  radiant  moods,  with  little 
rills  of  ecstasy,  as  of  lake  water  crisping  on  a  sunny, 
silent  beach.  In  those  moods  one  pronounces  one's 
own  absolution,  thinks  well  of  one's  former  employ- 
ers, regrets  every  unanswered  letter,  makes  mel- 
lifluous speeches  to  absent  camerados  and  cameradas, 
and  generally  carries  on.  The  clash  of  life  seems 
[  211  ] 


nonsense.  The  game  becomes  as  amicable  as  soli- 
taire. And,  if  one  is  able  to  stand  the  gaff,  one 
thinks  back  to  paradise,  flowers  to  the  right  and  to 
the  left  rather  more  than  in  the  sick-room,  and  an 
infinitely  more  sanctified  irresponsibility,  a  more  di- 
vine suspension  of  hapless  cause  and  gritty  effect. 

The  belief  in  this  sort  of  heavenliness  is  perhaps 
the  richest  daydream  in  the  American  and  Anglo- 
Saxon  world.  It  is  the  escape  from  life  which  peo- 
ple seek  in  fiction  which  J.  M.  Barrie  spontaneously 
supplies.  If  his  middle  age  has  sapped  a  little  of 
his  inventiveness,  he  is  no  less  a  romanticist.  He 
still  believes  in  fairy  godmothers  and  would  like  to 
wave  his  own  wand  over  an  errant  world. 

January  6,  1917. 


I  212   ] 


BARRIE'S  PLAYLETS 

DRAMAS  that  capitalize  the  charm  of  nursing  the 
wounded,  the  romance  of  waving  a  flag,  the  sadness 
of  lovers  leaving  for  the  front  —  these  have  a  right 
to  be  mentioned  by  virtue  of  being  so  thoroughly 
offensive.  There  was  something  horrid  about  even 
Bernhardt  wearing  a  bloody  shirt  and  dying  pro 
patria  at  the  end  of  a  loud  recitation.  The  war  is 
like  radium  in  its  intensity  as  a  theatrical  subject. 
Misused,  it  is  doubly  like  radium  in  doing  atrocious 
harm.  For  these  reasons,  reasons  pregnant  with 
recollection  for  New  York  playgoers  this  season, 
one  hates  to  confess  that  J.  M.  Barrie's  new  playlets 
are  mainly  about  the  war. 

The  signal  fact,  however,  is  that  Barrie  has  writ- 
ten The  New  Word  and  The  Old  Lady  Shows  Her 
Medals  with  a  decency  that  is  utterly  impossible  to 
the  second-hand  and  third-hand  playwrights,  who 
merely  appeal  from  their  own  vulgar  preconceptions 
to  the  vulgar  preconceptions  of  their  audience.  The 
war  about  which  Barrie  is  writing  is  not  a  sentimen- 
tality derived  from  daydreams  of  prowess,  Kipling 
fantasy,  school  yarns  of  knighthood,  pleasant  fan- 
cies of  endless  effort  and  cheery  self-sacrifice  without 
a  single  hint  of  flagging  energy,  depression,  poison- 
ous fatigue.  Slick  and  smug  as  the  outsiders  make 
war,  Barrie  has  forgotten  all  that  he  ever  dreamed 
of  unreal  heroisms  and  has  aimed  to  give  back 
through  art  the  wartime  London  in  which  he  is  im- 

[  213  ] 


mersed.  Tender,  whimsical  and  sensitive  he  re- 
mains, with  all  his  old  conviction  that  human  beings 
are  ever  groping  for  each  other  through  a  fog  of 
inarticulateness,  but  the  unity  that  the  war  has  given 
to  his  England  has  put  him  in  sober  possession  of  his 
own  people  in  London,  and  he  writes  of  them  with 
a  sense  of  the  meaning  war  has  for  ordinary  people 
such  as  the  American  pot-boiling  playwrights  have 
entirely  missed. 

Quite  often  at  Barrie  plays  I  find  myself  unper- 
suaded  by  the  author.  I  resent  having  him  suggest 
how  misunderstood  I  am,  and  how  forlornly  sym- 
pathetic, and  how  I  keep  lighting  a  signal  in  the 
window  of  my  heart  for  a  lover  who  never,  never 
comes.  If  such  preoccupations  existed,  I'd  be  for 
curing  them,  and  not  so  much  for  nursing  them  into 
a  solitude  romance.  But  in  the  two  war  playlets 
there  is  such  humor  mingled  with  the  recognition 
and  indulgence  of  sensibility,  and  such  excuse  for  it 
under  the  circumstances,  that  only  a  man  with  a 
heart  of  leather  could  fail  to  respond.  The  Barrie 
mood  has  not  greatly  altered,  but  the  theme  is  per- 
fect for  it,  and  so  delicately  accommodated  to  the 
beloved  familiarities  of  Barrie's  nature  that  a  finer 
result  could  scarcely  be  supposed. 

The  first  one-act  play,  The  New  Word,  did  not 
seem  so  well  performed  as  The  Old  Lady  Shows 
Her  Medals,  and  for  my  own  part  I  remember  The 
Old  Lady  with  deeper  satisfaction.  As  a  searching 
account  of  the  human  animal,  however,  The  New 
Word  is  incomparable.  A  middle-aged,  middle- 
class  Englishman  is  left  alone  with  his  young  son, 
who  is  in  his  uniform  as  lieutenant  and  next  day  is 
to  depart  for  France.  The  father  is  proud  of  his 
I  214  ] 


boy  and  the  boy  loves  his  father,  but  neither  of  them 
has  ever  overcome  the  embarrassment  of  close  kin- 
ship, and  Barrie  exhibits  them  in  all  the  awkwardness 
of  their  emotional  illiteracy.  For  a  really  civilized 
person,  perhaps,  this  playlet  would  have  little  or 
nothing  to  say.  It  would  mean  no  more  to  such  a 
rare  person  than  the  periodic  grunts  of  visiting  In- 
dians mean  to  us,  or  the  immeasurable  silences  of 
babies  inspecting  one  the  other.  But  far  as  we  may 
have  progressed  beyond  the  mute  Indian  or  the  mute 
baby,  most  of  us  are  aware  of  relationships  that  ache 
inside  us  like  life  awaiting  birth.  There  is  a  peculiar 
estrangement  that  is  bred  by  the  very  similarity  of 
temperament  between  father  and  son,  and  an  affinity 
that  makes  expression  seem  indecent.  This  is  so 
gently,  so  humorously,  suggested  in  The  New  Word, 
that  the  mawkishness  of  meaningful  theatrical  hand- 
clasps is  avoided.  Father  and  son  do  come  near  to 
each  other,  but  Barrie  is  satisfied  to  leave  them  Brit- 
ish to  the  end.  Had  he  made  them  more  articulate 
it  might  have  been  more  admirable,  but  it  would  have 
destroyed  their  realness.  To  the  last  embarrassed 
cough  of  Mr.  Trevor  the  father  is  real. 

A  chorus  of  London  charwomen  gave  the  second 
war  playlet  its  body  of  flavor.  However  little  the 
war  may  be  theirs  in  point  of  advantageousness,  it  is 
indubitably  theirs  by  association  and  sentiment  and 
preoccupation,  and  Barrie  shows  how  the  tentacles 
of  maternal  emotion  have  fastened  about  the  riddled 
hulk  of  Europe  without  regard  to  anything  but  the 
personal  and  regimental  adventure  to  which  these 
women  give  their  sons.  It  is  enough  for  those 
women  that  their  sons  are  at  the  front  to  become 
parties  themselves  to  the  pomp  and  circumstance  of 

[  215  ] 


war,  and  just  this  home  proprietorship  in  the  task 
of  the  empire  excites  a  lonely  charwoman,  tl  Mrs." 
Dowey,  to  wish  herself  the  mother  of  a  soldier. 
She  becomes  adopted  in  that  capacity  after  harsh 
resistance  by  a  singularly  outspoken,  uncompromis- 
ing and  breezy  Scotchman.  The  first  interview  be- 
tween the  demure  though  pertinacious  Mrs.  Dowey 
and  the  angry  male  who  has  fallen  into  her  clutches 
is  exceedingly  racy  and  yet  touching,  and  the  ma- 
neuvring  of  the  gigantic  Black  Watch  soldier  by  the 
small  body  that  wants  to  mother  him  is  all  the  more 
amusing  because  it  is  so  clearly  recognized  by  both 
woman  and  man.  Wonderfully  acted  by  Miss  Beryl 
Mercer  and  Mr.  John  M.  McFarlane.  If  Barrie 
had  been  sentimental  in  this  playlet,  if  he  had  made 
the  man  talk  to  slow  music  about  the  trenches,  it 
would  have  been  an  unbearable  nuisance.  It  is  ex- 
quisitely enough  that  the  man  should  say  in  his  reso- 
nant tone  that  the  men  in  the  trenches  are  thinking 
of  "  chiffon  "  and  then  ruthlessly  inspect  the  old 
lady's  best  dress  to  see  if  he  can  take  her  to  the 
theatre.  The  melting  of  Dowey  is  finally  admissible, 
and  his  formal  reception  of  parting  gifts  from  the 
other  charwomen,  including  The  Submarine,  is  a  nice 
touch.  Here,  with  or  without  the  silent  finale,  there 
is  a  mood  of  the  war  that  is  true  for  a  whole  people, 
one  that  gilds  dark  depths  with  silvern  light. 

When  the  Barrie  programme  was  first  arranged 
there  were  three  war  plays,  but  the  possibility  of  in- 
cluding Miss  Barrymore  in  The  Twelve  Pound  Look 
caused  the  management  to  retire  one  war  play  from 
active  service.  The  exchange  could  not  but  be  wise. 
Barrie  has  never  contributed  anything  more  incisive, 
more  capacious,  more  generous,  more  profound,  than 

[  216  ] 


this  short  stinging  commentary  on  male  illusions,  and 
Miss  Barrymore  has  never  given  so  serious  or  so 
spirited  a  performance.  In  a  short  play  there  are 
all  kinds  of  technical  difficulties.  To  prepare  for  an 
incident  is  almost  impossible  and  to  present  an  inci- 
dent without  preparation  is  to  leave  out  the  dimen- 
sion that  makes  for  reflectiveness.  The  author  of 
The  Twelve  Pound  Look  surmounts  these  difficulties 
like  a  master.  With  a  few  strokes  of  characteriza- 
tion and  reminiscence  we  have  before  us  three  com- 
plete persons,  the  woman  who  rejected  the  egoist, 
the  woman  who  accepted  the  egoist,  and  the  egoist. 
The  broadness  of  Mr.  Dalton's  acting  as  the  suc- 
cessful man  rather  detracts  from  the  play,  but  Miss 
Barrymore  is  always  in  the  picture  —  reasonable, 
ironic,  perceptive,  vigorous,  humane.  She  is  the 
event  of  the  evening. 

June  23,  1917. 


I  217  ] 


DRAMA  AND  THE  THEATRE,  2 


IT  would  be  interesting  to  discover  why  Miss 
Rachel  Crothers,  who  is  a  sensitive  and  knowing 
dramatist,  decided  to  stoop  to  conquer.  In  spite  of 
her  stoop  Old  Lady  31  is  decidedly  to  be  seen. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  a  producer  it  is  even  quite 
courageous,  but  it  makes  concessions  which,  granting 
how  intelligent  Miss  Crothers  is,  provoke  a  morbid 
curiosity. 

Any  one  who  has  ever  talked  to  a  theatrical  pro- 
ducer may  imagine  how  Old  Lady  31  first  hit  that 
professional  mind.  Twelve  old  women  on  the  stage 
for  three  acts,  old  women  in  the  decrepitude  of  an 
old  ladies'  home.  You  can  imagine  this  thought  im- 
pinging on  a  Broadway  mind.  Nothing  but  old 
women  —  old  women  with  their  hair  in  nets,  old 
women  with  high  shell-combs,  old  women  with 
shawls,  old  women  with  mittens,  old  women  with 
caps  —  frumpy,  toothless,  deaf,  quavering,  senescent 
old  things  listening  for  the  soundless  footsteps  of 
death.  You  may  guess  how  this  might  strike  a  pro- 
ducer. Miss  Crothers  is  an  artist,  with  a  strong 
sense  of  character.  She  could  see  it.  But  a  pro- 
ducer! What  do  you  see  in  the  crystal,  my  dear? 
I  see  $42  in  the  house  and  ten  old  women  on  the 
stage.  What  do  you  see  now,  my  dear?  I  seem 
to  see  twelve  old  women  on  the  stage,  and  $18.75  in 
the  house. 

To  produce  Old  Lady  31  for  Broadway  was  not 
[  221  ] 


considered  possible  until  it  was  heavily  "  sugared 
up."  After  the  fashion  of  sunshine  biscuits  and 
sunlight  soap  and  sun-kist  oranges,  it  was  termed  a 
"  sunshine  comedy,"  to  begin  with.  That  was  un- 
doubtedly supposed  to  remit  some  of  the  perils  of 
asking  Broadway  to  contemplate  old  age.  It  meant, 
in  the  sight  of  poverty  and  loneliness,  the  assurance 
of  optimism  which  Broadway  is  supposed  to  crave. 
But  the  advertisement  of  optimism  was  not  enough, 
the  written  bunkum  of  "  wholesomeness  "  and  sun- 
shine. It  had  to  be  squirted  into  the  play.  And, 
in  the  prologue  and  also  at  the  end,  the  syringe  of 
sweetening  was  used. 

The  old  couple  Angle  and  Abe  are  leaving  their 
sun-kist  cottage  —  Angie  to  go  to  the  old  ladies' 
home,  Abe  to  go  to  the  poor  farm.  They  have  been 
married  many,  many  years,  but  there  are  no  children. 
"  'Twan't  to  be."  This  is  a  real  situation,  one  in 
which  there  is  a  great  length  of  human  retrospect,  a 
definite  pathos,  a  chance  to  reveal  human  nature  and 
make  the  most  of  the  drama  to  come.  Well,  Be- 
lasco  couldn't  have  done  a  fouler  deed.  There  was 
much  excuse  for  the  old  lady's  inevitable  allusion  to 
a  lifetime  of  marriage  without  a  single  misunder- 
standing or  a  cross  word.  The  couple  next  me  held 
hands  at  this  touching  misrepresentation  of  inter- 
sexual  experience,  but  I  noticed  he  went  out  to  smoke 
at  the  end  of  the  first  act  and  left  her  to  boredom, 
just  as  usual.  The  rest  of  the  prologue  was  a  des- 
perate effort  to  establish  Angle's  angelic  character. 
She  scrimped  a  little  tobacco  every  day  so  that  Abe 
might  have  a  last  smoke.  "  You  beat  all,  mother." 
She  regrets  the  poor  auction  at  the  end  of  their  life- 
time but  rejoices  that  her  old  tea-strainer  brought 

[  222  ] 


three  cents  more  than  it  cost.  Think  of  it,  the  good 
Lord  letting  fall  that  crumb  of  consolation.  "  Ain't 
the  pansies  sweet  to-day?  I'm  out  here  talking 
things  O7er  with  the  pansies."  Then  a  little  sun- 
shine philosophy.  "  That's  what  the  pansies  under- 
stand." 

Few  people  know  What  Every  Pansy  Knows,  of 
course,  but  is  there  anything  more  pestiferous  in  real 
life  than  these  cooing  human  beings?  Angie  is  to 
be  the  sweetest  of  old  ladies.  When  she  refers  to 
her  "  bridal  wreath  "  and  blows  a  kiss  to  her  old 
house,  when  she  gives  Abe  a  flower  to  press  in  his 
bible  or  plucks  a  bouquet  for  Abigail,  she  is  to  be 
the  dearest  old  thing.  It  is  a  matter  of  scientific 
record,  however,  that  mature  women  who  live  in  the 
past  to  such  degree  as  this,  who  hold  conversation 
with  the  pansies  at  sixty  and  rejoice  over  a  three-cent 
episode  at  an  auction  sale,  are  merely  half-witted. 
If  they  had  had  less  sentimentalism  and  more  sense, 
there  would  have  been  absolutely  no  necessity  for  an 
auction.  No  sea-captain  could  have  survived  to  old 
age  with  such  a  spouse.  While  he  was  at  sea  he 
might  have  gotten  away  with  it.  That  is  one  of  the 
attractions  of  life  on  the  ocean  wave.  But  if  he  had 
lived  "  to  hum,"  as  Miss  Emma  Dunn  and  Mr. 
Reginald  Barlow  so  exultingly  pronounced  it,  he 
would  certainly  have  arisen  one  night  while  Angie 
slept,  and  tenderly  extinguished  her  for  ever  under 
the  tea-cosy,  and  then  strode  forth  to  take  the  good 
news  to  the  sheriff. 

So  far  Old  Lady  31  is  sheer  conformity  to  the 
professional  idea  of  what  Broadway  wants.  The 
minute  we  get  to  the  old  ladies'  home,  however,  and 
have  Miss  Crothers  reveal  the  human  nature  of  the 

[  223  ] 


women  in  that  home,  there  is  that  precious  veracity 
which  is  bound  to  dominate  a  comedy  audience. 
Louise  Forsslund's  book  may  have  given  Miss  Croth- 
ers  many  pointers,  but  it  is  she  alone  who  made 
possible  for  the  stage  the  reality  of  these  super- 
annuated types.  The  conventions  of  the  stage  re- 
quired performers  who  were  not  actually  as  much 
"  old  ladies  "  as  the  title  suggests.  But  this  hardly 
interfered  with  one's  sense  of  reality.  One  beheld, 
first,  a  rattlepate,  spitfire,  "  gabby  "  person  rocking 
violently  on  the  veranda,  in  conversation  with  an 
imposing  and  funereal  doctor's  widow,  joined  in  a 
few  minutes  by  a  saturnine  practical  person,  a  Mar- 
tha in  a  universe  of  Marys,  a  "  grouch."  Nothing 
could  have  been  more  humorous  than  this  idiomatic 
talk  on  the  veranda.  It  was  soon  enhanced  by  the 
addition  of  a  coy,  gurgling  creature  with  Victorian 
curls.  The  kindliness  with  which  these  "  inmates  " 
were  observed  in  all  their  foibles  and  sensitiveness 
and  pettiness  and  magnanimity  was  not  at  all  like 
the  sentimentalism  of  the  prologue.  It  had  an  art- 
ist's sagacity  and  penetration,  and  took  the  whole 
performance  out  of  theatricality  and  back  to  the 
immense  divertiveness  of  the  world  we  know. 

The  pathos  of  the  play  is  the  separation  of  old 
Abe  from  Angie,  at  the  door  of  the  old  ladies'  home. 
Its  inventiveness  is  shown  in  the  successful  revolu- 
tionary proposal  to  have  a  place  made  for  Abe  in 
the  home,  as  Old  Lady  31.  Had  Miss  Crothers 
gone  into  the  business  of  projecting  this  story  with- 
out knowing  and  respecting  her  human  material,  it 
would  have  been  a  thin  entertainment.  But  she  had 
such  a  strong  grasp  of  the  characters  she  proposed 
to  deal  with  that  the  new  factor  of  a  man  in  their 

[  224  ] 


communal  life  gave  her  just  the  chance  she  needed 
to  exhibit  their  amusingness.  Every  kind  of  femi- 
ninity comes  out  in  the  galvanizing  presence  of  Abe, 
and  every  kind  of  masculinity  is  produced  in  Abe, 
and  in  the  misogynistic  Mike,  by  the  presence  of  so 
many  concentrating  women.  In  all  this  part  of  Old 
Lady  31,  the  core  of  its  drama,  there  are  the  quali- 
ties which  make  Miss  Crothers  a  genuine  contributor 
to  American  drama  and  America's  capture  of  its 
own  life.  Aided  by  an  admirable  cast  of  women, 
and  by  a  remarkable  costume  designer  in  A.  Deutsch, 
a  drama  has  been  honestly  placed  in  one  of  those 
neglected  yet  ramified  areas  of  possibility  which  an 
integral  group  always  provides,  and  not  only  has  it 
been  placed  there  with  regard  to  its  plausible  oc- 
currence but  with  regard  to  the  fine  interest  of  the 
group  itself.  By  reason  of  her  ability  to  appreciate 
such  a  group,  to  see  its  powerful  interest  regardless 
of  the  supposed  needs  of  Broadway,  Miss  Crothers 
really  equips  herself  extraordinarily  to  write  genu- 
ine drama.  And  that  one  enjoys  about  Old  Lady 
31.  But  my  enjoyment  is  marred  by  the  stupid  con- 
ventionality of  the  ending  —  Abe's  windfall  —  and 
by  the  sunshine  so  assiduously  poured  in  and  about 
the  character  of  Angie.  Miss  Crothers  has  integ- 
rity as  a  creator.  It  is  worth  fighting  for,  against 
Broadway  and  hell  combined,  and  she  has  apparently 
not  managed  to  plan  for  her  integrity  or  to  risk  profit 
for  it  as  much  as  she  should. 

December  23,  iQi6. 


[  225   J 


TWENTY  iYEARS  AFTER 

man  boiled  and  served  with  caper  sauce  I 
do  not  believe  you  could  tell  him  from  mutton.  In 
his  own  mind  man  always  fears  to  be  a  wolf.  The 
much  greater  probability,  of  course,  is  his  approxi- 
mation to  a  sheep.  If  there  were  more  deep  self- 
knowledge  in  the  prayer-book  human  beings  would 
not  exclaim  against  their  turbulent  desires.  They 
would  beg  God  for  courage  enough  to  keep  from 
giving  the  hat-boy  a  dime.  They  would  ask  the 
good  Lord  to  deliver  them  from  the  terror  of  wear- 
ing a  Panama  after  September  I5th.  It  is  very 
gratifying  to  pretend  to  the  Lord  that  we  restrain 
ourselves  with  great  difficulty  from  murder.  The 
horrible  truth,  as  we  well  know,  is  our  mute  submis- 
sion to  every  form  of  grand  and  petty  tyranny. 
Why  are  we  strap-hangers  ?  Why  do  we  wear  black 
evening  clothes?  Why  do  we  go  to  funerals? 
Why  do  we  eat  baker's  white  bread?  Why  do  we 
sign  our  letters  "  yours  sincerely  "  ?  Why  do  we  let 
Horlick  and  Hershey  and  Burrowes  and  Carter  and 
all  the  other  infamous  vulgarians  scrawl  their  ugly 
names  across  the  fair  face  of  America?  Not  be- 
cause we  are  such  surging  iconoclasts  that  we  need 
the  Lord  to  keep  us  in  a  cage. 

In  relation  to  the  things  we  like  in  the  theatre 
there  is  no  essential  difference  as  to  American  be- 
havior. There  is  the  same  mute  submission  to  fash- 
ion, the  same  sheepishness  about  a  change.  The 

[  226  ] 


Philadelphia  lady  who  recently  bemoaned  the  mis- 
take we  made  in  1776  in  breaking  away  from  Eng- 
land has  merely  a  formal  grievance.  We  broke,  but 
we  did  not  break  away.  It  still  needs  an  Arnold 
Bennett  to  discover  George  Cohan  in  the  American 
theatre.  Our  own  critics,  timid  reporters  for  the 
most  part,  could  not  discover  the  excellence  of 
George  Cohan  because  no  one  had  given  them  the 
lead. 

The  immediate  cause  of  these  observations  is  Mr. 
Lazarus,  a  comedy  by  Miss  Ford  and  Mr.  O'Hig- 
gins.  The  authors  are  friends  of  mine,  and  I  have 
read  many  of  the  clippings  from  newspapers,  and 
nowhere  have  I  seen  an  original  critical  appreciation 
of  their  aims.  Praise,  yes,  a  great  deal  of  it,  and 
some  obvious  discriminations  of  an  intelligent  kind, 
but  no  positive  grasp  of  these  authors'  accomplish- 
ment. It  may  be  put  down  to  the  feebleness  of 
Americans  about  validating  their  art.  Had  J.  M. 
Barrie  invented  the  same  situations,  had  Arnold 
Bennett  invented  them,  the  critics  would  have  ap- 
proached the  comedy  in  a  proper  frame  of  mind. 
They  would  not  have  stumbled  over  its  lightness  or 
slightness,  stopped  with  its  brightness  or  triteness. 
They  would  have  functioned  as  critics.  It  is  an 
enormous  handicap  to  dramatists  in  America  that 
only  foreigners  of  a  reputation  that  gives  assurance 
to  sheep  can  hope  to  be  considered  with  anything 
like  full  seriousness  and  respect. 

The  situation  in  Mr.  Lazarus  would,  one  imag- 
ines, provoke  in  J.  M.  Barrie  the  same  amusement 
that  it  did  in  its  own  authors;  the  same  sly,  slim 
comedic  smile.  It  is  an  inherently  amusing  situa- 
tion, and  one  that  owes  its  value  to  its  suggesting 

[  227  ] 


life.  A  sentimental  author  could  not  have  used  it, 
but  Mr.  Lazarus  is  essentially  unsentimental.  Hav- 
ing no  desire  to  romanticize,  the  authors  could  avail 
to  the  full  of  the  contingency  they  proposed.  They 
set  in  the  background,  over  twenty  years  in  the  back- 
ground, an  ordinary  love-at-first-sight  marriage. 
They  indicated  the  accident  that  cut  the  couple  apart. 
They  then  showed  the  woman  of  this  marriage  as 
she  had  developed  —  developed  from  a  shy  young 
thing  into  a  middle-aged,  fussy,  worthy,  mentally  in- 
consequential boarding-house  keeper,  now  remarried 
to  a  greedy,  pompous,  self-deceived  parasite  male. 
And  they  brought  up  against  this  transmutation  of 
the  idyllic  girl-bride  the  man  who  has  kept  the  idyl 
for  over  twenty  years,  the  successful  but  lonely  first 
husband.  For  any  one  who  has  the  presumptions  of 
romantic  love  in  mind,  as  the  authors  undoubtedly 
had,  there  are  elements  of  high  humor  in  this  con- 
junction —  and  also  of  tenderness,  because  of  the 
daughter  that  was  born  subsequent  to  the  railroad 
accident  which  had  separated  John  Molloy  from  his 
young  wife.  Molloy  had  been  a  Western  miner. 
He  is  the  sort  of  man  who  "  comes  back  "  with  every 
sentimental  intention  to  pick  up  the  threads.  The 
second  husband  creates  a  difficulty,  but  one  that 
solves  itself  through  his  own  crookedness.  The  real 
difficulty  springs  out  of  the  change  that  has  been 
wrought  by  time.  So  far  as  the  authors  of  Mr. 
Lazarus  were  concerned,  this  change  was  grasped 
securely.  It  was  wittily,  humorously,  delicately, 
sympathetically  revealed. 

To  find  slightness  in  such  a  comedy  argues,  to  my 
mind,  a  taste  for  stronger  flavors  than  Mr.  Lazarus 
attempts  to  afford.  It  is  no  dramatic  onion. 

[  228  ] 


Where  it  calls  for  criticism  is  not  in  any  inherent 
slightness  of  theme,  but  in  certain  feebleness  of  han- 
dling by  the  actors  and  in  one  fragility  in  the  con- 
struction. That  fragility,  as  I  see  it,  is  in  the  char- 
acterization of  Mr.  Molloy's  daughter  Patricia  and 
of  the  penniless,  whimsical  artist-boarder  who  is  in 
love  with  her.  The  mother  is,  so  to  speak,  thor- 
oughly exemplified.  She  is  a  fool  about  the  mort- 
gage. She  is  divertingly  futile  about  the  impecuni- 
ous boarder.  She  drops  life  out  of  her  hands  as 
she  drops  the  bed  linen  out  of  her  hands,  and  she 
grabs  on  to  John  Molloy  as  she  grabs  on  to  the  near- 
est chair.  Dr.  Sylvester,  too,  is  exemplified  in  his 
work  on  "  instinctive  therapeutics "  and  the  rest. 
The  case  of  the  boy  and  the  girl  is  largely,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  tenuous  case  of  their  charm.  The 
main  situation  involves  them  but  does  not  extract 
their  full  character.  They  are  not  inevitably  salient. 
Had  Miss  le  Gallienne  the  vigor  to  suggest  the  girl's 
personality,  or  had  Mr.  Powers  the  skill  to  appear 
as  a  young  artist  with  backbone  in  his  work,  a  man 
to  carry  the  girl  with  him,  the  sketch  of  their  court- 
ship would  take  on  roundness.  As  it  is,  it  is  thin. 
The  thinness  of  John  Molloy,  however,  is  a  different 
kind.  It  derives  chiefly  from  the  imaginative  pov- 
erty of  Mr.  Henry  Dixey.  Mr.  Dixey' s  utter  lack 
of  authority  is  not  due  to  the  authors  of  the  play. 
They  gave  him  a  real  conception  —  a  man  rich  in 
texture  as  well  as  in  purse,  who  came  out  of  the  West 
to  find  a  wife  and  a  child,  and  was  doomed  to  lift  a 
curtain  on  an  empty  shrine.  This  man  Mr.  Dixey 
promenaded  as  a. creature  pleasant  so  far  as  his  foot- 
falls went,  and  mobile  of  countenance,  but  not  an 
atom  like  the  man  intended.  One  did  not  want  a 
[  229  ] 


miner  with  steel  ribs  in  his  chest  and  steel  rivets  to 
keep  his  heart  from  bursting  open  with  tenderness. 
One  did  want  something  not  so  essentially  perfunc- 
tory, so  lazily  and  vacantly  gracile.  In  Miss  Florine 
Arnold  as  the  wife,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  real 
capacity  for  that  broad  but  shrewd  characterization 
which  is  necessary  in  such  comedy.  She  had  her 
tricks,  as  the  authors  had,  but  she  joined  with  them 
in  keeping  a  clear  eye  to  life. 

Comedy  is  the  Roentgen  ray  of  the  spirit.  It  re- 
veals without  injury  the  realities  which  appearances 
fail  to  reveal.  There  is  this  digestive  eye  in  Mr. 
Lazarus.  Its  wit  is  one  element  in  its  attractiveness, 
a  wit  quite  fresh  in  the  theatre,  but  the  real  triumph 
of  the  authors  is  their  credible  and  amusing  version 
of  a  fairy  tale  put  to  the  test. 

September  23,  1916. 


[  230  ] 


THE  LIGHT  TOUCH 

1  HE  essence  of  priggishness,  Samuel  Butler  re- 
marks, is  setting  up  to  be  better  than  one's  neighbor. 
For  persons  like  ourselves,  who  are  really  better  than 
our  neighbors,  this  definition  has  no  teen;  but  I  know 
a  man  to  whom  I'd  apply  it.  We  met  him  as  we 
came  out  of  the  theatre  after  seeing  Good  Gracious 
Annabelle.  He  was  obviously  sustaining  emotion. 
On  his  ordered  young  countenance  he  exhibited  the 
traces  of  an  anguish  nobly  borne.  My  companion, 
who  knew  him  from  childhood,  addressed  him  thus- 
wise:  'Well,  Blankie,  didn't  you  have  a  good 
time?"  Blankie  answered:  "Are  we  never  to 
have  a  play  in  which  there  is  not  an  intoxicated  man? 
It  is  too  disgusting.  I  have  done  nothing  this  win- 
ter but  see  drunken  men  on  the  stage."  "  The 
world,"  my  companion  smiled  on  him,  "  is  all  too 
clearly  going  to  the  dogs."  To  me  she  murmured, 
"  The  poor  simpleton,  he  has  absolutely  nothing  in 
his  head,  absolutely  not  a  thing.  And  hear  him  talk, 
I  beg  of  you,  as  if  we'd  been  wallowing  in  the  sink 
of  iniquity."  And  on  him,  as  he  solemnly  bowed 
his  head  to  depart  in  a  motor,  very  likely  his  moth- 
er's, she  purposely  refrained  from  smiling  a  gossip's 
perfidious  good-night. 

As  to  other  inebriate  performances  this  young  man 
was  possibly  sound.  I  do  not  recall  them.  But  his 
freezing  disapproval  of  Good  Gracious  Annabelle 
showed  too  great  a  preoccupation  with  correctness. 

[231  ] 


It  was  his  business  at  Good  Gracious  Annabelle  to 
be  amused.  He  had  no  other  business  there,  and 
if  that  play  did  not  succeed  in  amusing  him  he  could 
only  say  he  failed  it  or  it  failed  him.  He  could  not 
successfully  raise  the  question  of  taste.  For  the  play 
was  so  arranged  from  the  start,  both  by  author  and 
by  cast,  that  a  neighborliness  was  aroused  in  the  au- 
dience, and  the  one  kind  of  man  who  could  hold  out 
against  that  neighborliness  was  the  kind  that  sets  up 
to  be  better  than  his  neighbor. 

The  fable  of  Good  Gracious  Annabelle  hardly 
needs  to  be  mentioned.  Its  object  is  merely  to  give 
a  competent  cast  its  chance  to  be  amusing,  and  to 
give  the  author  play  for  her  fancy.  Everything 
really  turns  on  the  charmingness  of  Annabelle. 
Without  that,  without  the  fillip  to  our  friendliness 
that  is  provoked  by  a  piquant  girl,  there  would  be  no 
excuse  for  taking  up  with  her  little  adventure.  But 
once  we  willingly  adopt  the  tone  of  the  good-natured 
lawyer  who  is  guardian  of  Annabelle's  misfortune, 
once  we  second  him  in  taking  her  under  our  wing, 
the  humor  of  her  position  and  its  solution  becomes  a 
source  of  constant  entertainment.  Seeing  the  penni- 
lessness  of  every  one  with  whom  she  is  stranded  in 
her  stylish  New  York  hotel,  in  the  midst  of  giving  a 
luncheon  party,  the  tax  on  Annabelle's  charm  as  well 
as  her  purse  is  evident.  It  is  actually  a  farcical  situ- 
ation, but  a  single  trace  of  farce  in  Annabelle  would 
change  everything.  By  the  art  of  actress  and  au- 
thor, however,  this  subsidized,  extravagant,  inde- 
pendent princess  of  the  American  realm  manages  in 
every  impulse  and  gesture  to  capture  that  American 
blitheness  out  of  which,  one  might  loosely  say,  Henry 
James  eked  a  greater  part  of  his  treasure.  This 

[  232  ] 


comedy  is  of  a  cheaper  metal,  naturally,  but  of  the 
same  national  currency  that  Mr.  James  delighted  to 
specialize  in,  the  currency  with  a  winged  victory  for 
model.  She  is  irresponsible,  this  Annabelle,  but  she 
does  not  lose  her  note  of  happy  expectations  and 
fresh  confidence  and  sensible  girlish  candor.  And 
when  she  decides  to  make  her  way  via  the  kitchen, 
with  all  her  friends  as  fellow-servants,  she  wins  her 
audience  to  the  extent  of  their  issuing  a  blank  check 
on  credulity. 

Fortunately  for  the  dramatist,  there  is  no  limit  to 
the  luck  through  which  Annabelle  is  hired  as  cook 
for  a  Long  Island  country-house.  The  swigging 
little  spendthrift  whose  butler  engages  her  is  none 
other  than  the  man  who  has  come  to  possess  her 
priceless  share  of  stock.  And  the  man  who  pays  for 
her  luncheon  party  and  who  bribes  the  spendthrift's 
butler  to  make  him  free  of  the  Long  Island  estate  is 
none  other  than  the  man  who  wants  the  priceless 
share  of  stock,  and  who,  years  before,  etc.;  which  is 
the  marvelous  secret  of  the  whole  play.  There  is 
little  in  these  contrivances  to  justify  amusement  in 
Good  Gracious  Annabelle.  They  are  unusually  pre- 
posterous. But  no  comedy  depends  less  on  its  fable, 
or  more  on  the  manner  in  which  each  clash  of  char- 
acter is  heightened  and  displayed.  Displayed,  that 
is,  for  the  sake  of  a  pleasant  silliness,  of  a  merri- 
ment showing  that  sympathy  has  been  engaged. 

To  turn  a  story  of  life  into  an  amusing  game  a 
dramatist  must  either  have  a  remarkable  plot  or  a 
singular  prettiness  of  fancy  or  a  happy  gift  for  en- 
gaging the  sympathy  of  the  audience.  It  is  this  last 
gift  that,  for  most  of  those  who  see  it,  makes  the 
slightness  of  Good  Gracious  Annabelle  as  irrelevant 

[233  ] 


as  the  vagrancy  of  a  perfume.  One  cares  nothing, 
as  one  sits  at  it,  about  the  fatuity  of  the  poet  turned 
gardener  or  the  squalor  of  the  bibulous  scullery- 
maid  or  the  unrelieved  drunkenness  of  the  dissipated 
little  heir.  All  these  exhibitions  of  character  and 
the  lack  of  it  come  out  only  as  part  of  a  comedy  pat- 
tern, in  which  the  redemption  of  Annabelle's  fortunes 
is  the  game  at  which  one  plays.  She  is  a  ninny  about 
money,  just  as  the  hotel  detective  is  an  idiot  about 
psychoanalysis,  but  we  never  feel  that  the  drunken- 
ness has  any  significance  except  in  relation  to  Anna- 
belle's  escapade,  and  it  is  no  more  a  thing  to  be 
moralized  about  than  the  departure  of  Don  Quixote 
from  pacifism.  Unless,  of  course,  we  are  moralists 
like  the  Rockefellers,  who  unanimously  frown  upon 
indulgence  in  anything  except  industrial  alcohol. 
The  pattern  of  comedy  in  Good  Gracious  Annabelle 
is  quite  readily  accepted  as  soon  as  Annabelle  her- 
self attains  our  sympathy,  and  to  that  she  should  be 
sufficiently  helped  by  her  completeness  as  a  daughter 
of  the  feministic  American  gods. 

If  an  Elizabethan  came  to  New  York  and  man- 
aged the  dangerous  journey  from  his  hotel  to  Broad- 
way and  42nd  Street,  I  do  not  believe  he  would  find 
as  much  amusement  inside  the  theatres  as  he  would 
on  the  earth  outside,  and  above  the  earth,  and  under- 
neath. If  he  sought  Turn  to  the  Right,  I  think  he'd 
be  amused  by  its  quips  but  amazed  at  its  imaginative 
emptiness  and  its  vapid  sentimentality.  If  he  looked 
to  Willie  Collier  in  Nothing  but  the  Truth,  I  think 
he'd  be  surprised  at  the  exaggerations  of  the  accom- 
plished star's  performance  and  dismayed  by  the  want 
of  dramatic  resource  and  subtlety  in  developing  so 
good  an  idea.  If  he  saw  The  Thirteenth  Chair,  I 

[234] 


believe  he'd  be  intrigued  and  excited,  recognizing 
some  old  tricks  and  many  new  ones,  and  seeing  dis- 
tinguished perception  in  the  work  of  Miss  Margaret 
Wycherly.  He  might  try  many  other  plays,  in  the 
mood  of  a  stranger  seeking  gayety  and  elation  and  a 
flight  into  the  sun  of  comedy.  I  believe  he  could 
seek  farther  than  Good  Gracious  Annabelle  and  fare 
worse.  Neither  Miss  Vokes  as  scullery-maid  nor 
Mr.  Nicander  as  the  master  nor  Mr.  Roland  Young 
as  the  poet  would  offer  him  performances  at  any 
great  remove  from  his  own  tradition.  They'd  be 
likely  to  amuse  him.  And  if  the  Annabelle  of  Miss 
Lola  Fisher  failed  to  pique  him,  I  miss  my  Eliza- 
bethan guess. 

January  20, 


[235  ] 


FOR  THE  ELEVENTH  TIME 

THERE  is  no  good  reason  why,  if  you  have  lost 
him,  you  should  seek  out  the  T.  B.  M.  But  if  you 
should  be  looking  for  him,  in  all  the  fat  prosperity 
that  is  mixed  up  with  corn  bread  and  self-sacrifice, 
you  can  easily  find  him,  very  hot  and  probably  a  lit- 
tle drunk,  at  the  eleventh  reproduction  of  the  Zieg- 
feld  Follies.  He  sits  at  the  Follies  in  rows,  red- 
faced  and  genial  and  pop-eyed,  his  dinner  an  immedi- 
ate and  pervasive  recollection,  his  drink  between  the 
acts  a  happy  prospect.  The  extent  to  which  he  gulps 
at  the  semi-naked  chorus  is  the  greatest  tribute  there 
is  to  the  shrewdness  of  the  leg-show  producer. 
Like  a  large  fish  floundering  after  a  butterfly,  he 
yearns  toward  the  pseudo-nudity  on  the  stage.  Just 
how  much  nudity  to  give  the  T.  B.  M.  must  be  a  fine 
problem  for  the  Ziegfeld  management,  the  dullness 
of  giving  too  little  being  apparent  and  the  risks  of 
giving  too  much  being  obvious.  But  nudity  is  un- 
doubtedly the  bait  that  fetches  him  to  the  Follies 
and  it  accounts  for  a  good  deal  of  that  entertain- 
ment's otherwise  unaccountable  success. 

Is  there  any  objection  to  a  semi-naked  chorus? 
Not  from  me.  But  I  do  dislike  to  see  sour,  unripe 
and  poisonous  entertainment  disguised  by  the  over- 
employment of  sex.  If  the  Ziegfeld  chorus  were 
clothed  in  brown  jaegers  by  order  of  the  mayor,  the 
paucity  of  the  entertainment  in  general  would  be 
shockingly  revealed.  And  just  because  I  am  not  a 

[  236  ] 


tired  business  man  in  an  active  state  of  anti-prohi- 
bition I  decline  to  take  glimpses  of  nudity  in  lieu  of 
every  other  amusement.  The  titillation  of  sex  is  not 
of  itself  a  sufficient  evening's  diversion,  not  even 
when  the  lingerie  advertisement  becomes  incarnate 
and  walks  around  —  as  a  bride-to-be  —  on  the  stage. 

As  against  the  humbler  variety  show,  with  under- 
trained  chorus  and  garish  setting  and  shoddy  clothes, 
there  is  always  something  to  be  said  for  the  Follies. 
In  everything  that  calls  for  a  promoter  with  money 
at  his  command  the  Follies  surpasses  the  kind  of  pro- 
duction that  was  stereotyped  years  ago.  It  uses 
electric  light  in  a  hundred  ways  and  uses  enough  of 
it  to  flood  a  town.  It  has  a  large  and  quite  noisy 
orchestra.  The  chiffon  in  one  scene  alone  cost 
$3,000  or  $30,000,  and  in  every  scene,  semi-naked 
or  the  reverse,  the  costumes  of  the  chorus  are  bril- 
liant, audacious,  superb.  Whatever  Mr.  Joseph 
Urban  does  in  the  way  of  decoration  is  an  attractive 
substitute  for  the  stuffy  settings  that  he  came  to 
banish.  The  blue  distance  he  so  often  arranges  is 
itself  a  fine  relief  in  the  theatre  eye,  and  is  just  one 
note  in  his  suave  decorative  scheme.  But  when  these 
excellences  have  been  dutifully  contrasted  with  the 
slipshod  failings  of  the  older  or  cheaper  musical 
comedy,  something  does  remain  to  be  said  on  the 
score  of  entertainment. 

Two  Ziegfeld  fans,  "  released  n  by  whatever  firm 
manufactures  these  typical  New  Yorkers,  felt  it  their 
mission  to  reenforce  the  orchestra  the  night  I  at- 
tended the  Follies.  Male  and  female  created  He 
them,  and  the  male  whistled  while  the  female  trilled. 
Judging  by  the  zeal  of  this  pair,  much  should  be  said 
for  the  music  by  Raymond  Hubbell  and  Dave 

[  237  ] 


Stamper,  and  it  is  only  fair  in  my  dullness  as  to  music 
to  insist  that  this  particular  music  may  be  excellent 
of  its  kind.  But  if  it  be  agreed  that  the  rhythms 
of  the  Ziegfeld  Follies  are  not  routine  rhythms,  re- 
peating on  an  elaborate  scale  the  rhythms  to  which 
the  Ziegfeld  patrons  have  long  been  accustomed,  then 
they  are  unique  in  a  production  where  everything 
else  is  routine,  the  routine  humor  and  the  routine 
sensuousness  and  the  routine  Manhattanese  mag- 
nificence. For,  in  spite  of  or  because  of  the  re- 
sources that  distinguish  this  lavish  production,  there 
is  nothing  about  it  to  suggest  that  it  was  produced 
by  creative  human  beings.  It  is,  on  the  contrary, 
institutional  —  in  the  sense  that  a  hotel  banquet  is 
institutional.  And  for  perhaps  that  reason,  unfor- 
tunately, it  seems  to  reach  the  tired  business  man 
where  he  lives. 

There  are  oases  in  the  glittering  desert.  Will 
Rogers  in  the  wise  patter  that  accompanies  his  rope- 
act  is  thoroughly  human  and  amusing,  and  there  is 
a  small  dog  managed  by  Russell  Yokes  that  is  ex- 
tremely funny  as  an  inebriate.  For  the  rest,  apart 
from  a  rare  moment  or  two,  there  is  nothing  in  the 
exhibition  of  the  comedians  that  is  out  of  routine. 
Poor  Bert  Williams  has  an  act  which  is  watered 
down  from  all  the  leaves  of  past  performances,  and 
W.  C.  Fields  merely  substitutes  tennis  for  billiards 
in  order  to  repeat  his  juggling.  Miss  Fanny  Brice 
has  a  good  deal  of  cleverness  though  not  much  taste. 
It  is  only  in  her  caricature  of  the  Egyptian  dancer 
that  her  particular  kind  of  coarse  humor  has  its  op- 
portunity. Two  other  comedians,  Eddie  Cantor  and 
Walter  Catlett,  try  hard,  but  a  dismal  memory  of 
bug-humor  and  jokes  about  money  and  the  stock  rep- 

[  238  ] 


resentation  of  effeminacy  is  all  that  I  can  now  revive. 

There  must  be  a  cause  for  this  aridity,  aside  from 
the  Ziegfeld  dependence  on  the  sexual  appeal,  and 
I  am  inclined  to  think  that  the  biggest  cause  for  it  is 
the  undemocratic  character  of  the  T.  B.  M.  Of 
course  the  T.  B.  M.  will  stand  for  stock  patriotism. 
Few  things  are  more  unpleasant  than  to  have  patriot- 
ism the  excuse  for  tableaux  in  the  Follies,  and  to  have 
impersonators  take  off  Washington  and  Lincoln  and 
Wilson,  but  the  business  man  rejoices  in  this  sort  of 
dreadful  literalness  and  applauds  "  Can't  you  hear 
your  country  calling?"  Where  the  T.  B.  M.  is 
limited  is  in  his  enslavement  to  prosperity  and  the 
narrowness  of  the  life  connected  with  it,  and  it  is  the 
devotion  of  the  Follies  to  the  preoccupations  of  the 
prosperous  that  makes  it  so  dull,  outside  of  its  sex- 
uality. There  is  nothing  humane  about  any  one  of 
the  episodes  that  engross  the  producers.  There  is 
nothing  that  ventures  on  such  homogeneity  as  Briggs 
the  cartoonist  can  count  on,  or  that  has  a  glimmer  of 
the  national  sentience  of  George  Ade.  There  is 
only  the  showy  exhibition  of  clothes,  the  "  episode  of 
the  purse,"  the  "  episode  of  the  information  bu- 
reau," the  "  episode  of  the  telephone  wires,"  the 
"  episode  of  New  York  Streets  and  Subway  " —  the 
purse,  the  railroad  station,  the  telephone  booth  and 
Broadway  all  being  symbols  for  the  externalized 
existence  of  the  T.  B.  M.  The  fact  that  sentimen- 
tality is  revealed  over  the  telephone,  not  money- 
humor,  hardly  alters  the  situation.  In  the  life  that 
Ziegfeld  wishes  to  celebrate  there  is  a  place  for  sen- 
timentality— "  episode  of  the  garden  of  girls." 

He  is  by  no  means  a  regular  New  Yorker,  this 
sympathetic  patron  of  the  Follies.  Much  more 

[  239  ] 


often  he  is  a  business-seeker  and  business-dispenser 
from  smaller  cities,  away  from  home  and  hungry  for 
excitement.  He  is  out  of  his  safe  reins  and  blinkers. 
He  has  no  idea  how  to  entertain  himself,  and  every 
desire  to  be  entertained.  It  is  in  boredom  and  the 
restlessness  of  boredom  that  he  goes  to  the  Follies, 
almost  fatuously  ready  to  be  lured  and  allured. 

If  the  business  man  were  less  antisocial  there 
could  easily  be  a  leg-show  that  was  also  amusing  and 
humane.  The  present  narrowness  of  his  existence, 
however,  tends  to  keep  the  Ziegfeld  Follies  ostenta- 
tious and  empty  and  dull.  Even  genuine  comedians 
like  Bert  Williams  cannot  break  the  crust  that  keeps 
forming  over  the  producers  of  the  Ziegfeld  Follies 
—  for  the  real  producers,  after  all,  are  the  business 
men  in  front. 


[  240  ] 


THE  POPULAR  HIT 

''iHEY  don't  come  much  better  than  that"  I 
agree  with  my  unknown  contributor.  It  is  warm 
praise,  but  it  gives  the  first  fine,  free  reaction  on  the 
fun  of  Watch  Your  Step. 

After  all,  it  is  a  pleasant  thing  to  live  in  a  small 
town.  Out  in  the  big,  cold  world  you  know  nobody, 
and  nobody  knows  you.  But  here  in  New  York  we 
all  know  the  local  gossip,  share  in  the  local  jokes,  are 
on  to  the  local  celebrities.  It  isn't  as  if  you  lived 
in  the  great  lonely  city  where  people  are  stiff  and 
formal,  where  nobody  ever  "  loosens  up."  I  am 
thinking  of  centres  like  Rockland,  Me.,  where  the 
standard  is  sixteen  to  one,  sixteen  seductive  silvern 
remarks  on  your  part  to  one  golden  token  of  silence 
on  the  part  of  the  exuberant  native.  In  New  York 
there  may  be  certain  provincial  drawbacks,  certain 
narrow  interests  and  island  ways,  but  at  least  when 
our  local  talent  is  let  loose  we  all  feel  the  coziness 
and  neighborliness  that  comes  in  a  one-horse  town. 

Take,  for  example,  our  accomplished  townsfolk, 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Vernon  Castle.  Everybody  in  New 
York  knows  the  Castles.  On  Broadway  they  are  in 
the  midst  of  intimate  and  often  communicative 
friends.  And  when  Frank  Tinney  says :  "  Vern, 
you'll  be  in  the  hall  of  fame  all  right,  but  you'll  be 
there  with  Tracy  the  Outlaw,  Captain  Kidd  and  all 
the  other  hold-ups,"  everybody  sees  the  jape,  because 
the  prices  he  gets  for  his  dancing  lessons  are  the  talk 

[  241  ] 


of  the  town.  And  when  Mr.  Castle  says  he  likes 
singing,  Frank  Tinney  remarks :  '  You  say  you  like 
singing.  Well,  you  married  her."  And  the  roof 
lifts.  They  give  Mrs.  Castle  a  piece  in  the  show 
so  that  she  may  dance,  but  her  singing  is  very  Chi- 
nese. 

Vernon  Castle  is  a  good  deal  of  the  show.  Not 
every  one  knew  he  could  chant,  and  it  was  a  surprise 
when  he  sat  down  before  two  drums  and  proved  his 
fingers  were  as  rhythmic  as  his  toes.  In  the  play  he 
is  a  fashionable  Englishman,  very  creditable  for 
home  talent,  but  the  chief  thing  was  of  course  his 
dancing.  There  wasn't  enough  plot  in  the  play  to 
put  in  a  teacup.  He  simply  danced  whenever  he  got 
rested.  Every  time  Mrs.  Castle  entered  she  ap- 
peared in  a  new  and  more  lovely  costume,  sometimes 
a  figured  and  formal  dress,  sometimes  little  more 
than  draperies  of  exquisite  shades.  Her  perform- 
ance was  a  delight,  especially  when  she  came  careen- 
ing in  and  just  sailed  lightly  around  the  stage.  She 
and  he  did  a  polka,  the  sort  of  thing  people  used  to 
dance  in  the  sarsaparilla  age,  before  we  discovered 
that  dances  could  be  made  up  like  cocktails  and  gin 
fizzes.  They  gave  many  of  these  Bronx,  Manhattan 
and  Martini  varieties  as  well,  with  fifty  in  the  chorus 
to  assist  them;  all  to  syncopated  music,  the  music  so 
fittingly  named  after  a  very  Disastrous  disorder  of 
the  heart. 

One  reason  every  one  in  New  York  is  keen  about 
the  Castles  is  that  they  are  the  living  exhibits  of  a 
get-rich-quick  romance.  Frank  Tinney  says  in  the 
play  that  Mr.  Castle  used  to  be  a  waiter.  Now  he 
takes  his  salary  home  every  night  on  a  push-cart. 
In  a  big  city  this  would  not  interest  anybody,  but 

[  242  ] 


every  one  likes  to  drink  in  the  appearance  of  such  a 
marvel  in  a  small  place  like  New  York. 

In  vaudeville,  the  most  rigid  form  of  entertain- 
ment, a  man  is  disgraced  whose  act  does  not  run  like 
a  machine.  One  of  the  joys  of  Watch  Your  Step  is 
the  local  ease  and  freedom.  The  trick  dog  of  vaude- 
ville becomes  in  Watch  Your  Step  the  "  good  dog  " 
that  calmly  lies  down  when  he  is  told  to  stand  on  his 
head.  It  is  very  irregular  and  wrong.  It  would 
never  do  where  people  were  not  at  home.  But  so 
little  sense  has  this  audience  of  the  serious  obliga- 
tions of  trick  dogs,  that  they  laugh  as  if  the  per- 
former were  a  friend. 

Another  thing  characteristic  of  a  genial  town  is 
the  fun  you  can  have  about  grand  opera.  In  a  big 
city  they  take  opera  seriously.  In  Chicago  people 
begin  to  get  gloomy  at  the  prospect  of  opera  early  in 
November,  and  the  gloom  rests  over  the  entire 
North  Side  until  the  hilarious  season  of  Lent.  The 
first  thing  Chicagoans  thought  about  when  the  war 
broke  out  was :  "  Thank  God,  we  can  cut  out  grand 
opera  without  letting  the  cat  out  of  the  bag."  But 
in  New  York  a  pleasantly  "  jay  "  attitude  toward 
opera  is  quite  the  thing.  Watch  Your  Step  has  one 
scene  revealing  the  Opera  House.  All  the  boxes  are 
full  of  morose  men  reading  the  religious  news,  the 
only  column  left  in  their  papers.  The  ladies'  hair 
is  all  ablaze  with  private  electric-lighted  tiaras,  Mr. 
Edison's  latest  cultural  device  —  not  so  useful  as  his 
cement  houses,  but  almost  as  beautiful.  Several  of 
the  patronesses  go  home,  complaining  that  the  sleep- 
ing accommodations  are  mediaeval.  The  stage  is 
first  occupied  by  Caruso,  the  only  opera  singer  uni- 
versally known.  Caruso  is  succeeded  by  Frank  Tin- 

[  243  ] 


ney,  the  carriage  caller,  who  immediately  takes  the 
real  audience  into  his  confidence  about  the  expert  co- 
median's favorite  topic,  nothing  in  particular. 

When  an  innocent  damsel  asked  her  swain  to  re- 
peat one  of  Tinney's  jokes  in  the  orchestra,  the  co- 
median came  forward  to  remark:  "  Don't  tell  her. 
Make  her  listen  herself."  But  he  was  too  kind  to 
give  her  name  to  the  rest  of  Broadway.  Tinney's 
color  in  the  play  was  black.  He  changed  his  clothes 
from  a  carriage  caller's  to  a  Pullman  porter's,  and 
from  the  Pullman  porter's  to  a  coat  room  boy's,  but 
like  a  good  comedian,  he  never  changed  his  face. 
Because  of  the  plot  he  was  not  let  come  on  till  the 
second  act,  when  the  plot  was  removed.  As  the 
Pullman  porter  he  made  no  effort  to  reach  the  plane 
of  metropolitan  wit.  Of  the  proud  father  of  twins 
who  had  just  received  a  silver  loving-cup  from  Colo- 
nel Roosevelt  he  solemnly  inquired:  "  Do  you  get 
it  outright,  or  do  you  have  to  win  it  three  times?  " 

Watch  Your  Step  does  not  keep  up  a  serious  plot. 
The  story  it  tells  New  York  is  the  story  New  York 
likes  to  hear,  the  story  of  its  own  times,  its  own 
foibles,  its  own  favorites.  It  does  not  play  up  to, 
or  down  to,  its  public.  Undisguisedly  assured,  it 
plays  directly  with  its  public,  and,  cleverly,  viva- 
ciously, successfully,  plays  on  it.  There  is  nothing 
fulsome  about  its  flattery,  nothing  transparent  about 
its  device.  It  does  not  buttonhole  New  York  too 
rudely  or  attempt  too  obvious  an  appeal.  But  with 
a  great  deal  of  adroitness  and  considerable  real 
humor  it  rolls  the  ball  —  not  too  swiftly  —  until  the 
audience  is  as  excited  as  a  kitten.  And  when  it  over- 
takes the  ball  —  not  too  difficult  —  the  audience  lit- 

[  244  ] 


erally  purrs.     It  is  an  immensely  successful  enter- 
tainment. 

It  succeeds  because  it  has  a  friendly  common 
touch.  A  stranger  from  Mars  might  be  puzzled 
at  our  motor  jokes,  our  Erie  jokes,  our  Pullman 
jokes,  our  hotel  and  coat  room  and  dancing-school 
and  grand  opera  humor.  He  might  miss  these 
touches  of  urban  familiarity  that  make  our  whole 
world  kin.  But  it  would  be  his  loss.  He  would  not 
have  had  the  advantages  of  living  in  little  old  New 
York. 

January  9,  1915. 


[  245  ] 


THE  NEGRO  PLAYERS 

.NOT  long  after  Mr.  Edward  Sheldon  began  his 
career  he  wrote  a  play  called  The  Nigger,  which  ag- 
gregated and  solidified  in  one  production  almost 
everything  that  an  audience  of  wine  agents  might 
require  in  a  racial  melodrama.  There  was,  as  I 
remember  it,  a  rape  committed  somewhere  off  stage. 
There  was  a  lynching  in  the  wings.  There  was  the 
imminence  of  a  mixed  marriage,  a  drop  of  Negro 
blood  being  discovered  in  the  hero  just  in  time  to 
save  the  white  fiancee.  Mobs,  I  recollect,  rumbled 
around  the  house  where  the  fated  man  was  com- 
muning with  his  soul,  and  these  grim  deliberations 
ended  in  his  renouncing  the  governorship  to  which 
he'd  been  elected  and  deciding  to  devote  his  life  to 
his  own  people  instead.  Such  incidents  were  not 
selected,  as  Mr.  Thomas  Dixon  might  have  selected 
them,  out  of  a  large  natural  endowment  of  malig- 
nancies. Mr.  Sheldon  had  no  animus  against  the 
Negro,  but,  like  most  Americans,  he  had  remembered 
his  newspapers  too  well.  The  things  he  associated 
with  the  Negro  were  the  copy-desk  conventional 
things.  To  the  Negro  he  could  discern  for  himself 
he  had  turned  a  wall-eye. 

This  conventionality  has  its  splendid  reaction  in 
Mr.  Ridgely  Torrence's  plays  which  Mrs.  Hapgood 
has  just  produced  at  the  Garden  Theatre.  Mr.  Tor- 
rence  is  an  Ohio  poet  who,  looking  at  the  Negro 
beyond  the  miasma  that  surrounds  him,  has  seen 

L  246  ] 


something  so  utterly  different  that  his  tenderness  has 
occasionally  got  the  better  of  him,  and  he  has  poured 
out  his  heart  to  the  colored  people  like  a  hospitable 
wine.  So  different  are  the  men  and  women  and  chil- 
dren whom  Mr.  Torrence  has  perceived  for  himself, 
it  is  scarcely  strange  that  his  impulse  should  be  ex- 
cessively generous,  but  one  rejoices  that  this  impulse 
enabled  him  to  share  the  self-consciousness  of  a  par- 
ticular group  of  American  citizens  as  it  has  seldom 
been  shared  before.  There  are  three  plays  in  the 
programme  of  the  Garden  Theatre,  the  first  a  com- 
edy, the  second  a  tragedy,  the  third  a  "  Passion  inter- 
lude "  —  the  incident  of  Simon  the  Cyrenian  in  the 
way  of  the  cross.  And,  under  the  fine  direction  of 
Robert  Edmond  Jones,  these  plays  are  acted  entirely 
by  Negro  players.  What  marks  the  occasion  in  spite 
of  Mr.  Torrence's  sympathies  and  the  specialty  of 
the  players,  is  not,  however,  only  racial  solicitude  or 
propaganda.  Not  all  the  propaganda  or  solicitude 
on  earth  can  add  a  cubit  to  artistic  stature,  and  unless 
there  is  artistic  stature  in  a  theatrical  production  it 
has  no  excuse  for  existing.  Its  purpose  may  be 
humane,  but  no  purpose  is  humane  enough  to  justify 
inhumane  behavior  to  an  art.  There  is  nothing  in- 
humane in  the  behavior  of  Mrs.  Hapgood's  enter- 
prise. It  is,  all  things  considered,  as  fine  an  enter- 
prise as  the  American  theatre  has  seen  for  years. 
It  is  the  emergence  of  an  artistic  Cinderella  into  the 
palace  where  she  belongs.  One  undiscovered  coun- 
try in  emotional  America  is  Negro  country,  and  these 
productions  have  disclosed  it  in  a  fresh  and  vigorous 
and  lovely  way.  The  costumes  and  scenery  by  Mr. 
Jones  go  far  toward  making  the  performances  suc- 
cessful, apart  from  the  dramatist's  contribution,  but 

[  247  ] 


for  myself  the  actors  had  unusual  power  and  charm. 
Had  the  Negroes  been  Puritans  perhaps  they  would 
not  speak  so  musically.  Thank  the  Lord  they  were 
not  Puritans.  Besides  their  gracious  speech  there 
is,  despite  much  amateurishness,  a  real  capacity  for 
creating  illusion.  The  performance  of  Miss  Marie 
Jackson-Stuart  as  Granny  Maumee  had  real  limita- 
tions, but  I  found  myself  curiously  thrilled  whenever 
she  raised  her  empty  gaze  and  declared,  "  My  eyes 
will  yit  behold!  "  Considering  the  other  awkward- 
nesses in  the  play  my  responses  were  due,  I  suppose, 
to  the  adventitious  eloquence  of  a  racial  identity 
between  actor  and  dramatis  persona.  How  could  it 
help  being  poignant?  But  the  artistic  transporta- 
tion of  one's  sympathies  was  accomplished,  I  think, 
in  the  first  play,  The  Rider  of  Dreams. 

What  white  man,  what  white  magistrate  even,  has 
failed  to  chuckle  over  the  Negro  chicken-stealer? 
Mr.  Torrence  has  taken  a  Negro  for  The  Rider  of 
Dreams  who  has,  in  some  sort,  this  light-fingered 
habit,  and  he  has  made  out  of  him  the  chief  character 
in  a  flashing,  lustrous  comedy,  the  kind  of  comedy 
that  reveals  in  waywardness  such  a  riding  of  dreams 
as  only  a  man  touched  with  the  spirit  of  Puck  could 
imagine.  The  way  Mr.  Torrence  has  caught  the 
poet  in  his  Rider  of  Dreams,  has  kept  the  rollick  and 
lilt  of  Madison  Sparrow  without  disturbing  his  in- 
nocence, is  a  proof  that  with  delicate  art  any  kind 
of  personality  may  be  established  on  the  stage.  But 
in  the  intoxicated  romance  of  Madison  Sparrow,  in 
the  gallop  of  his  imagination,  there  is  no  dependence 
on  the  popular  idea  of  the  Negro.  Who  supposes 
that  in  the  whitewashed  cabin,  the  child  eating  his 
bowl  of  mush,  the  strict  woman  of  the  house  sprin- 

[248] 


kling  clothes  at  the  ironing-board  to  one  side,  a  ne'er- 
do-well  husband  will  scarcely  start  his  supper  before 
breaking  out  into  a  glorious  humorous  chant,  at  once 
racial  and  personal,  which  spurns  the  wife's  leading- 
strings  just  as  much  as  the  laborious  earth  itself? 
No  one  reared  on  the  fodder  of  newspapers  is  pre- 
pared for  such  a  burst  of  poetry,  but  the  domestica- 
tion of  it  by  Mr.  Torrence  is  as  completely  convincing 
as  it  is  enchanting.  The  bombast  of  the  child  is  in 
Madison  Sparrow,  as  one  might  expect,  but  the 
clouds  of  glory  that  stream  from  him  as  he  wings 
along  are  too  full  of  color  and  delight  not  to  enlist 
the  wilding  in  every  heart.  It  is  good  luck  that  the 
part  fell  to  an  actor  like  Mr.  Opal  Cooper  who  could 
droop  his  wings  as  well  as  spread  them,  and  exhibit 
the  humor  of  a  Sparrow's  fall  as  well  as  his  rise. 

The  tragedy  of  Granny  Maumee  does  one  grim 
service,  it  lifts  a  corner  on  the  Negro  aspect  of  racial 
hate.  Here  there  is  a  reversal  of  that  contamina- 
tion which  would  thrill  wine  agents  in  The  Nigger, 
The  contamination  which  the  blind  Granny  Maumee 
dreads  is  white  man's  blood  in  a  family  of  royal 
Negro  blood.  Mr.  Torrence's  invention  seemed 
rather  feeble  in  this  tragedy,  and  it  was  hard  to 
listen  to  the  actress  who  kept  saying  of  Mr.  Light- 
foot,  the  white  villain,  "  He  —  Would  —  Have  — 
His  —  Way."  You  felt  sorry  for  her,  but  you 
wished  she  could  command  a  less  mechanical  utter- 
ance. The  white  baby,  too  (performed  by  a  large 
doll),  was  too  reminiscent  of  Broadway  acting  to 
make  one  happy. 

The  emotionality  of  Mr.  Torrence  reached  satura- 
tion point  in  Simon  the   Cyrenian.     Why  Procula 
(Mrs.  Pontius  Pilate)  should  have  pleaded  so  hard 
[  249  ] 


for  Jesus  was  not  easy  to  grasp,  and  there  was  some- 
thing not  entirely  simple  about  the  machinery  that 
projected  Simon  the  Negro  into  prominence  in  the 
story  of  the  Crucifixion.  The  symbolism  of  that 
crown  of  thorns  which  Simon  also  came  to  wear  was 
not  enough  to  carry  the  play.  And  is  it  not  possible 
that  Simon  was  a  poor,  trembling,  intimidated  man, 
on  whom  the  soldiers  laid  brutal  hands?  This  would 
be  an  irrelevant  question  if  it  were  not  relevant  that 
Simon  the  Cyrenian  provokes  irrelevant  questions. 
Its  picturesqueness  lifts  it  into  interest,  however,  and 
keeps  it  from  canceling  a  victory. 

April  4, 


[  250  1 


VARIA 


WHITAKER'S  ALMANACK 

most  people  see  it,  a  desert  island  is  a  place  of 
extreme  intellectual  respectability.  Thanks  to  Dr. 
Eliot  and  Sir  John  Lubbock,  we  know  what  that 
means.  It  means,  among  other  things,  spending  a 
definite  portion  of  each  day  pondering  Plutarch's 
Lives.  And  hundreds  of  thousands  believe  in  this 
programme,  for  a  desert  island.  Deprived  of  ac- 
cess to  current  fiction  and  periodicals,  they  believe 
they  would  there  take  the  literary  veil.  In  the  world 
he  lives  in,  an  unregenerate  man  seldom  puts  the 
classic  programme  in  practice.  He  thinks  highly  of 
Spinoza,  Aristotle,  Gibbon,  the  Volsunga  Saga.  But 
he  no  more  adheres  to  them  than  he  adheres  to  the 
admirable  habit  of  walking  eight  miles  rain  or  shine. 
If  he  were  cast  upon  an  ultimate  isle,  he  fancies,  all 
would  be  different.  Should  a  visiting  ship's  crew 
come  roving  into  his  secreted  lagoon,  he  would  be 
discovered  under  a  plane  tree  conning  the  best  trans- 
lation of  the  Inferno.  Such  is  his  faith  in  the  idyllic 
character  of  natural  man.  It  is  a  pleasant  but  I  fear 
a  fantastic  persuasion. 

It  has  never  been  my  own  fate  to  be  cast  upon  a 
desert  island.  I  was,  however,  once  cruelly  ma- 
rooned for  twelve  hours  in  a  small  hotel  bedroom. 
There,  by  the  courtesy  of  the  Gideons,  I  found  await- 
ing me  a  copy  of  the  greatest  book  in  the  world. 
What  were  my  emotions?  Did  I  gratefully  leap  at 
it,  plunge  into  it  as  a  porpoise  plunges  his  beak  into 

[  253  ] 


his  native  seas  or  a  teamster  into  his  native  An- 
heuser?  On  the  contrary,  I  perused  with  great  care 
the  hostelry's  declaration  of  independence  on  the 
back  of  the  door.  I  read  a  bit  of  newspaper  that 
lined  the  bureau  drawer.  I  knew  that  the  book  of 
Job  beckoned  me,  the  story  of  Ruth,  the  Song  of 
Solomon.  But  a  strange  rigidity  of  spirit  arrested 
me  as  I  sought  to  open  the  Bible.  I  sank  as  a  valley 
below  the  height  of  formidable  culture.  I  was  as 
water  invited  to  come  upstairs.  At  the  other  side 
of  the  height  was  the  sun.  I  did  not  venture  to  deny 
it.  But  the  shadows  of  Dr.  Eliot  and  Sir  John  Lub- 
bock  painted  the  approach  to  elevation  an  incredibly 
inky  black.  I  spent  the  rest  of  my  isolation  joy- 
riding  through  a  time-table. 

Out  of  sheer  subserviency  a  Bible  would  go  with 
me  to  a  desert  island.  I'd  take  a  Shakespeare.  If 
possible,  I'd  also  take  a  shovel  and  a  lump  of  chalk, 
the  two  other  requisites  of  a  noble  style.  But  for 
recreation's  sake,  for  lazy  gratification,  I  should  not 
depend  upon  the  classics.  I  would  smuggle  along 
with  me  some  such  diverting  masterpiece  as  Whit- 
aker's  Almanack.  Although  English  and  conserva- 
tive, Whitaker's  is  incomparable,  the  dean  of  al- 
manacks. It  is  to  the  World  Almanac  of  New  York 
what  opera  in  a  foreign  tongue  is  to  opera  in  English, 
what  the  Republican  party  is  to  the  Democratic,  what 
the  Martini  is  to  the  Clover  Club.  It  is  the  porter- 
house, the  Corona,  the  J.  P.  Morgan  of  almanacks. 
This  is  its  comparative  excellence.  It  does  not  show 
why  Whitaker's  is  a  literary  palladium.  Perhaps 
it  isn't.  These  things  are  matters  of  idiosyncrasy. 
But  after  years  of  browsing  in  its  rich  fields,  after 
nights  of  long  delectation  among  its  placid,  saga- 

[254] 


clous,  indomitable  facts,  it  would  be  infidelity  not  to 
speak  for  it  even  in  the  company  of  the  classics. 

It  is  not  for  any  "  cultural  "  reason  that  I  should 
wish  to  have  Whitaker's  Almanack  on  the  island.  It 
is  not  for  any  utilitarian  reason.  It  is  largely,  I 
think,  for  the  immense  sense  it  gives  of  life,  espe- 
cially Anglo-Saxon  life.  Whitaker,  after  all,  is  no 
mere  collector  of  reliable  and  disconnected  facts. 
He  is  an  indefatigable,  scrupulous,  positive,  meti- 
culous inventory-taker  of  the  universe,  "  with  special 
reference  to  the  British  Empire."  He  is  the  kind 
of  man  who,  in  a  club,  makes  you  believe  that  there's 
no  place  like  home.  He  is  the  kind  of  man  who 
desolates  a  Pullman  car.  But  strictly  under  one's 
own  control,  obedient  to  one's  whim,  assiduous  at 
one's  slightest  command,  he  is  extremely  interesting, 
even  gratiating.  And  there  is  a  certain  humor  in 
him.  The  unavailing  pretentions  and  unraveled 
complexities  of  races  and  classes  amuse  him.  "  India 
has  147  vernacular  languages,"  he  permits  himself 
to  marvel,  "  of  extraordinary  variety."  Why  ex- 
traordinary, when  you  think  of  its  size?  But  in  a 
world  where  an  inch  of  rain  is  "  an  inch  of  rain 
on  the  surface  of  an  imperial  acre,"  these  foreign 
things  are  extraordinary.  At  the  Cape  of  Good 
Hope,  for  example,  Whitaker  particularizes  13,704 
Baptists,  but  he  adds:  "Of  no  religion,  1,077,998, 
of  whom  1,047,233  were  natives."  These  imperial 
shrugs  are  part  of  Whitaker's  repertoire. 

He  begins,  as  he  should,  with  a  conspectus  of  the 
solar  system.  Fixed  stars,  star  clusters,  colored 
stars,  clock  stars,  are  duly  noted.  But  my  pleasure 
is  not  derived  from  this.  It  is  such  a  thing  as  his 
table  of  "  distance  from  London  to  the  Capitals  of 

[  255  ] 


Europe"  that  seems  ambrosial  to  me.  It  is  1843 
miles  from  Paris  to  Moscow.  It  is  2030  miles  from 
Constantinople  to  London  "  with  the  mails."  What 
of  it?  Yet  such  facts  engage  me.  So  equally  does 
the  fact  that  Marquess  Camden  is  John  Charles  Pratt 
under  his  title,  and  that  I  address  him  "  My  Lord 
Marquess!  "  So,  equally,  that  the  revenue  of  the 
Nizam  of  Hyderabad  is  £3,000,000  a  year  and  that 
he  is  entitled  to  a  salute  of  21  guns.  Should  you 
need  to  know  the  correct  salute  for  the  Jam  of 
Nawanagar,  Whitaker  can  tell  you.  It  is  a  mean 
ii  guns.  But  the  Jam's  revenue  is  only  £151,000: 
the  more  revenue,  the  more  guns.  These  lists  of 
potentates  serve  no  purpose  of  mine.  They  de- 
velop no  principle.  But  to  read  them,  to  hop  from 
Nawab  to  Raj  Rana,  from  Rampur  to  Jind,  is  to  be 
filled  with  a  sense  of  magnificence.  The  world  is 
multiform.  From  the  revenues  in  opium  to  the  845,- 
871,300  oysters  produced  in  France,  I  proceed  with 
a  mind  carefree,  unconstrained,  charmed.  I  did  not 
know  the  French  ate  so  many  oysters.  I  did  not 
remember  that  India  depended  so  greatly  on  opium. 
I  regard  Whitaker  as  the  most  startlingly  omniscient 
of  men. 

For  the  incipient  vers  librist,  Whitaker's  is  a  mine 
of  raw  material.  Take  South  Africa,  with  its  sor- 
did materialistic  imports,  its  exports  so  often  primi- 
tive and  romantic. 

Fish,  fodder,  fruit, 
Sugar  and  tobacco, 
Wine, 

Bark  wattle,  buchu  leaves, 
Ostrich  feathers,  mohair, 
Hides  and  skins  and 
[  256] 


Wool. 

Asbestos,  whale  oil, 

Coal,  copper,  tin  ore, 

Diamonds, 

Dynamite,  and 

Gold. 

These  are  the  most  trivial  offerings  of  Whitaker. 
He  has  1065  pages.  But  they  may  indicate  why  I 
decline  to  be  parted  with  him.  He  fills  me  with  a 
sense  of  importance  and  virtue.  Like  business  it- 
self, he  is  sedative.  He  twists  a  tourniquet  about 
the  questing,  disturbing  soul. 

February  5,  1916. 


D257] 


THE  IMITATION  OF  CHRIST 

THAT  clean  sunlit  morning  she  appeared  at  the 
door  in  youthful  white,  ready  for  the  garden  with  a 
pink  parasol.  She  said  good  morning  in  her  bell- 
like  chest  tones,  and  I  stood  up  with  my  finger  in 
my  book. 

She  was  a  wonderful  woman,  I  thought,  a  won- 
derful creation,  and  I  ventured  to  speculate  as  to  her 
age.  Her  hair  was  still  dark,  her  cheeks  faintly 
tinged  with  color,  but  how  long  her  cheeks  had  been 
tinged,  how  long  her  hair  dark,  I  did  not  dare  to 
guess.  In  all  the  capitals  of  Europe,  as  they  put  it, 
she  had  been  at  home  for  a  generation,  her  eyes  a 
swift  look-out,  her  nose  a  cleaving  prow,  her  tongue 
a  keen  blade.  Various  ambitions  for  this  world  she 
had  sown  and  reaped.  Her  cheek  was  finely  fur- 
rowed like  a  harvested  field.  Her  presence  in  the 
white  doorway  made  me  uncomfortable.  I  wished 
to  return  to  my  book. 

It  is  only  by  accident  that  such  people  as  ourselves 
came  together  —  mainly  the  accident  of  living  in  a 
land  where  guardian  railings  are  uncommon,  where 
it  is  not  the  fashion  to  have  walls  ivied,  and  hos- 
pitable with  broken  glass.  But  the  accident  was 
chiefly  my  secret,  one  which  her  tilted  telescope  could 
not  take  in. 

She  did  not  know  me.  That  is  to  say,  she  was  a 
person  of  high  preoccupations  and  while  I  had  swum 
before  her  vision  she  had  never  had  occasion  to 

[  258  ] 


identify  me  or  to  suppose  that  I  could  have  any 
significance  worth  her  while.  This  morning,  indeed, 
I  arrested  her  attention,  but  largely  because  her  eye 
roved  too  incautiously  into  the  room  off  the  veran- 
da, and  the  human  body  is  opaque.  In  this  fact, 
had  I  remembered  it,  was  my  protection.  I  had  only 
to  remain  politely  mute  to  go  on  being  inconse- 
quential. In  her  eyes  I  was  matter  but  not  neces- 
sarily organic  matter  —  a  harmless  brick,  probably, 
in  the  path  of  her  four-in-hand  tour.  But  I  did  not 
remember  I  was  a  brick.  I  fancied  I  was  human, 
and  I  fancied  I  was  generating  a  current  of  atten- 
tion which  it  was  my  instant,  impulsive  object  to 
divert.  Why  I  should  have  feared  her  attention  I 
do  not  know,  but  I  did  fear  it,  and,  standing  helpless 
before  her,  I  instinctively  raised  my  book. 

She  gathered,  simple  soul,  that  I  wished  to  bring 
her  notice  to  it.  Being  timid  and  therefore  ready 
for  any  convenient  insincerity  I  at  once  pretended 
to  myself  that  I  had  wished  it  to  find  her  notice. 

"  Have  you  ever  read  it?  "  I  asked  eagerly. 

Age  may  be  circumvented  in  other  people's  eyes. 
It  takes  liberties  with  one's  own.  She  had  not  her 
glasses,  and  she  could  not  read  the  title. 

'  What  is  it?  "  she  inquired,  as  if  the  pleasure  of 
imparting  the  title  must  be  mine. 

A  sudden  sense  of  incongruity  came  to  me.  It 
was  incongruous,  in  the  first  place,  that  I  should  be 
reading  this  book.  It  was  not  my  habit.  It  did 
not  represent  me.  This,  as  I  guessed,  could  make 
no  difference  to  her.  She  would  not  care  if,  away 
from  her  presence,  I  stood  on  my  head.  But  even 
more  incongruous  was  it  to  ask  her  if  she  had  read  it. 
I  did  not  suppose  she  had.  I  did  not  really  care, 

[  259  ] 


either.  But  the  embarrassment  of  our  encounter  had 
plunged  me  into  a  senseless  question  and  I  had  to 
go  on. 

"  It  is,"  I  said  brightly,  "  The  Imitation  of  Christ." 

Had  it  been  Admiral  Mahan  or  the  memories  of 
an  indiscreet  Duchess  or  the  history  of  the  Floren- 
tines she  would  have  understood.  But  Thomas  a 
Kempis,  presumably,  was  no  friend  of  hers.  Her 
manner,  however,  betrayed  nothing.  She  may  have 
had  a  thought.  I  do  not  believe  she  did.  She  did 
not  pause  for  an  instant.  She  felt  nothing  per- 
ceptible, no  incongruity,  no  discordancy. 

"  Oh,  yes,"  she  rose  to  the  occasion.  "  Isn't  it 
charming?  " 

In  all  the  capitals  of  Europe  she  had,  as  I  said, 
pursued  a  career  sufficiently  proud.  She  belonged 
to  the  great  world  and  she  was  a  power  in  it,  a  power 
in  personal  relations  through  her  vigorous  and  un- 
scrupulous will,  a  power  through  her  people  in  most 
of  the  affairs  that  count.  She  was  an  oligarch,  an 
insider.  Wherever  a  strip  of  red  carpet  intersected 
the  sidewalk  her  motor  would  naturally  stop  of  its 
own  volition,  and  if  the  heavens  were  at  that  mo- 
ment raining  on  the  just  and  the  unjust  alike  an  um- 
brella would  spring  up  by  the  side  of  her  limousine, 
like  a  magic  mushroom,  and  she  would  go  up  the 
steps  as  unconscious  of  the  machinery  of  her  class 
as  a  baby  is  unconscious  of  the  milk  problem.  In 
all  the  conversation  beyond  those  steps,  on  politics, 
on  dominion,  on  character,  on  art,  on  style,  on  en- 
tourage, on  the  sultry  affairs  of  men  and  women,  her 
deep  chest  tones  would  be  heard  resonant  and  amus- 
ing, with  enough  friendliness  in  it  to  win  attention  to 
her  and  enough  danger  to  make  herself  felt.  I  had 

[  260  ] 


never  seen  her  in  action,  but  even  a  warship  in  bunt- 
ing cannot  belie  its  long  predacious  guns.  She  would 
be  heard  from  in  action,  and  when  the  smoke  cleared 
away  there  would  be  a  gash  in  the  other  fellow's 
hide. 

Supposing  that  she  was  like  this,  letting  one's 
fancy  play  about  her,  there  was  an  unexpected  pleas- 
ure in  her  reaction  on  my  morning's  book.  Charm- 
ing! She  could  not  invent  it.  Her  tone  had  that 
perfect  surface  which  only  comes  with  long  practice 
in  intercourse.  It  was  not  deferential.  It  was  not 
glib.  It  was  not  heartfelt.  It  was  simple,  authori- 
tative, complete.  When  she  said  that  the  Imitation 
of  Christ  was  charming,  there  was  no  more  for  any- 
one to  say.  It  was  not  impatient  or  perfunctory.  It 
was,  as  she  held  it,  adequate.  But  it  closed  the  door 
on  the  subject  impartially,  without  fury  or  furtive- 
ness.  It  quite  politely  let  Christ  out. 

Had  such  a  One  been  to  call,  had  she  actually  con- 
fided in  me,  I  do  not  believe  it  would  have  been 
in  any  way  different.  In  her  set,  very  likely,  the 
opinions  about  him  would  rapidly  have  been  can- 
vassed. There  would  have  been  glowing,  excited 
young  women,  disturbed  elderly  women,  angry  wives 
of  men  downtown,  a  few  thin,  ascetic,  unmarried 
women  in  whose  dark  eyes  the  experience  would  be 
deep.  It  would  have  come  up  at  tea.  "  What  do 
you  think  of  him?  What  sort  of  impression  did  he 
make  on  you?  "  and  every  one  would  have  gone  into 
the  discussion,  one  of  those  discussions  which  are  the 
human  equivalent  of  multitudinous  twitterings  in  the 
sky.  But  she,  bell-voiced,  wrinkled,  hawk-eyed,  she 
would  have  no  trouble  about  accounting  for  him.  It 
would  not  occur  to  her  to  repel  him  or  discountenance 

[  261  ] 


him.  If  he  fluttered  the  world  she  lived  in,  that  flut- 
tering she  would  regard  with  keen  malice,  without 
disturbance  or  alarm.  On  such  a  matter  she  would 
have  equanimity,  so  long  as  he  did  not  throw  bombs 
or  destroy  governments.  And  she  would  appreciate 
his  sincerity.  "  Isn't  he  charming?  "  It  might 
readily  be  conceived. 

As  she  left  me  to  my  book,  to  walk  among  the 
early  flowers  in  the  gracious  garden,  it  seemed  to 
me  a  deity  had  left  me,  one  who  was  beyond  my 
good  and  evil,  a  creature  from  another  sphere.  All 
the  vertebrates,  says  a  big  tome,  are  obviously  re- 
ducible to  one  style  of  architecture  —  and  she  and  I 
are  both  vertebrates.  But  I  was  incapable  of  re- 
solving our  style.  Is  it  necessary  to  attempt  such 
things?  Is  it  necessary  to  make  human  nature  con- 
gruous? The  struggle,  if  necessary,  passes  beyond 
my  power.  I  was  content  just  to  watch  her  making 
friends  with  her  quick  grandchild  down  the  garden, 
and  see  them  en  rapport  among  the  flowers. 

April  29,  1916. 


THE  SICKBED  OF  CULTURE 

newspaper  made  breakfast  rosy.  Oats  were 
steady.  The  coffee  market  had  rallied.  Linen  was 
moving  better.  Lard  and  ribs  were  easier.  But  in 
the  late  afternoon  I  bought  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
and  thereupon  came  to  behold  the  seamy  side  of  this, 
our  mortal  adventure.  A  reactionary  tendency,  it 
appears,  has  developed  in  the  realm  of  the  spirit. 
There  is  a  sag  in  culture.  Culture  is  slowly  but  hide- 
ously being  extirpated  from  our  midst.  The  Extir- 
pation of  Culture  is  the  very  legend  of  the  composi- 
tion that  details  our  shame.  As  if  it  were  a  weed, 
a  heresy,  an  abnormal  growth,  culture  is  being  rooted 
out  and  destroyed.  Oyez !  Oyez  1  Oyez !  Come, 
sweaty  varlets,  scriveners,  senators,  vestrymen,  chi- 
rurgeons,  chymists,  draymen,  ironmongers  and  such- 
like !  Awake  to  the  crisis.  Attend  to  the  disgrace 
and  peril  of  our  state. 

It  is  a  woman  who  appears  with  bitten  visage  from 
the  sickbed  of  culture.  Ordinarily  she  refrains  from 
speaking  of  these  things  to  the  gross  multitude.  She 
"  habitually  says  nothing  to  the  professional  op- 
timists in  the  public  square."  But  there  is  a  time 
when  the  worst  must  be  faced.  And  it  is  in  this 
mood  of  chilled  yet  passionate  reproach  that  our  lady 
Agoraphobia  fetches  us  to  the  shaded  chamber  of 
the  culture  we  are  doing  to  death.  Culture,  poor 
dear,  "  contact  with  the  best  that  has  been  said  and 
thought  in  the  world,"  has  had  a  time  in  the  vulgar 

[  263  ] 


jostle  of  modernity.  As  an  image  of  this  refine- 
ment (not  as  an  image  of  this  refinement's  defender) , 
imagine  a  fragrant  New  Englander,  a  reticule  in 
one  mitten,  perhaps  the  odes  of  Sappho  in  the  other, 
conscious  that  she  is  the  "  disciplined  and  finished 
creature,"  conscious  that  she  is  "  intellectually  ex- 
clusive," conscious  also  that  "  culture  is  inherently 
snobbish,"  being  asked  to  fight  her  passage  into  a 
metropolitan  subway.  "Step  lively!"  The  im- 
perative jars  the  lady.  She  gingerly  boards  the  train. 
On  the  platform  there  is  contact,  but  it  is  not  pre- 
cisely "  contact  with  the  best  that  has  been  said  and 
thought  in  the  world."  Do  you  wonder,  seeing  her 
chaste  bonnet  somewhat  tipsy,  her  lips  compressed, 
an  alarming  color  tinging  her  marmoreal  cheeks,  that 
Barrett  Wendell  emits  a  tiny  squeal  of  pain,  that 
Edith  Wharton  rolls  an  eye  to  heaven,  that  the 
shades  of  Pater  and  Matthew  Arnold  flutter  un- 
happily? New  England  culture  is  laid  between 
sheets,  with  nothing  but  the  Atlantic  for  hot-water 
bottle. 

And  who  is  to  blame  for  this  prostration  of  our 
precious  culture?  The  gross  multitude.  Once  cul- 
ture had  seclusion.  The  social  scheme  did  not  allow 
intrusive  minions.  "  Still  less  would  the  conception 
of  the  public  intellect  have  admitted  the  notion. 
Every  one  was  not  supposed  to  be  congenitally  quali- 
fied for  intimacy  with  the  best  that  has  been  said  and 
thought  in  the  world."  But  now,  mainly  due  to  "  the 
increased  hold  of  the  democratic  fallacy  on  the  pub- 
lic mind,"  the  slums  pour  forth  dreadful  aspirants  to 
culture,  encouraged  by  traitorous  Brahmins;  science 
contributes  its  stinking  acid-stained  barbarians;  prag- 
matic philosophers  take  away  the  guardian  standards 

[  264  ] 


of  beauty  and  truth.  The  angry  daughter  of  the 
Brahmins  descends  to  slang,  the  expletive  of  the  con- 
tinent, in  her  rage  at  the  invasion.  "  Science  is  on 
top."  "  The  classics  are  back  numbers."  We  are 
"  overrun  by  the  hordes  of  ignorance  and  material- 
ism." Our  children  sip  English  from  the  founts  de- 
filed by  the  poor,  "  an  active  and  discontented  ma- 
jority, with  hands  that  pick  and  steal." 

Belonging  to  the  upper  classes,  as  she  confesses, 
this  gifted  prosecutor  is  certainly  entitled  to  our  sym- 
pathy. For  conceive,  she  is  experiencing  in  her  de- 
gree the  loneliness  of  God.  Looking  down  on  the 
inimical  multitude  she  suffers  the  pangs  of  isolation. 
"  I  begin  to  think,"  she  observes  sadly,  "  that  our 
age  does  not  really  care  about  perfection."  But 
since  "  culture  must  always  be  in  the  hands  of  an 
oligarchy,"  perhaps  a  voice  de  profundis  might  be 
raised  to  the  heights.  It  is  quite  permissible,  even 
if  the  monitor  herself  is  unfortunate  enough  to  use 
the  German  word  "  kultur  "  like  an  ignoramus,  to 
be  decidedly  severe  about  the  bumptious  ignorance 
of  the  masses.  It  is  quite  permissible  to  argue  that 
upper-class  people  are  "  apt "  to  arrive  through 
riches  at  the  aesthetic  truths.  But  a  passion  for  ex- 
clusiveness,  a  belief  in  the  restriction  of  cultural  sus- 
ceptibility to  the  well-nurtured,  is  all  to  no  purpose 
if  she  permits  outsiders  to  come  up  like  flowers. 
The  worst  handicaps  of  the  neglected  culture  over 
which  she  wrings  her  fair  hands  is  not  "  the  material- 
ism of  all  classes,"  "  the  influx  of  a  racially  and 
socially  inferior  population,"  "  the  idolatry  of  sci- 
ence." It  is  its  supersession  by  another  culture  to 
which  orthodox  culture  has  not  the  clue. 

To  prevent  this  rivalry  there  should  be  a  most 
[265  ] 


vigilant  campaign  against  every  new  human  expres- 
sion. That  is  the  best  way  to  keep  the  oligarchy 
entrenched.  If  the  ignorant  foreigners,  "  immi- 
grants who  bring  n6  personal  traditions,"  come  from 
countries  of  oppression,  she  must  decline  to  believe 
that  they  had  a  literature  and  a  culture.  There  is 
only  one  culture,  our  own.  Perhaps  in  steerage  you 
can  evoke  noises  from  a  Lithuanian  that  sound  like 
human  speech.  Yes,  but  soon  that  Lithuanian  will 
have  "  the  locutions  of  the  slum."  Beware  of  Lith- 
uania. Do  not  pat  the  strange  dog.  He  might  bite 
a  piece  out  of  your  culture.  What  if  the  young 
Jewess  on  the  immigrant  ship  glows  with  assent 
when,  without  Russian  or  Yiddish  or  German,  you 
query:  Dostoevsky?  Gogol?  Tchekov?  Lermontov? 
Tolstoy?  Schnitzler?  Sudermann?  Artzibashef?  Ib- 
sen? Strindberg?  It  is  not  conversation.  It  is  mere 
fraternal  intercourse  through  modernity's  names. 
The  suppression  of  such  names  is  the  first  great  neces- 
sity of  a  pinhead  conception  of  culture.  And  what 
of  Poles  and  Spaniards  and  Italians  and  Scandi- 
navians? What  of  Constantine  Meunier,  thrusting 
Walloons  into  culture?  And  H.  G.  Wells  with  his 
counter-jumpers  and  Bennett  with  his  human  inch- 
worms,  merely  keeping  the  earth  fertile,  and  Shaw 
with  that  dreadful  winnowing  fan  in  his  head? 
These  things  must  be  stopped.  Upstairs  in  the  Brah- 
min mansion  there  is  a  delicate  lady,  disturbed  by 
modernity.  She  hates  pathology  and  economics. 
She  hates  that  science  which  "  challenged  the  super- 
eminence  of  religion."  She  honestly  cared  for  things 
of  the  spirit,  attempted  no  royal  road  to  salvation. 
For  her  comfort  it  is  required  that  democracy,  sci- 
ence, industrialism,  suspend  their  evolutions.  It  is 

[  266  ] 


a  good  deal  to  ask,  perhaps,  but  she  asks  in  the  name 
of  beauty  and  moral  imagination.  These,  she  takes 
it,  she  has  loved  above  all  others.  It  is  not  her 
fault  if  she  insists  with  tight  acidity.  She  hates 
crowds.  She  is  confined  within.  She  cannot  take 
the  air. 

October  9 


[267] 


A  STYLIST  ON  TOUR 

Vv  HEN  you  speak  admiringly  of  Henry  James, 
the  later  Henry  James,  it  is  the  platitude  among  a 
large  class  to  say:  "  Life  is  too  short.  I  loved  the 
early  Henry  James.  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  was 
wonderful,  and  I  could  follow  him  to  The  Turn  of 
the  Screw,  but  never  again.  It  is  probably  my  own 
stupidity,  but  I  can't  stand  the  later  style." 

It  is  a  matter  of  taste,  a  matter,  that  is  to  say,  of 
emotion,  and  you  cannot  argue  a  man  out  of  his  emo- 
tions. But  for  my  own  part,  I  am  happy  that  I 
enjoy  the  later  labyrinthine  James.  Had  I  pos- 
sessed the  open  straightforward  nature  of  my 
friends,  had  I  been  more  like  a  locomotive  engineer 
in  my  own  psychology,  I  do  not  imagine  that  a  sup- 
posedly tortuous  style  could  give  me  exquisite  pleas- 
ure. But  if  it  is  discreditable  to  be  like  this,  at  any 
rate  it  is  a  happy  viciousness.  And  I  am  even  sorry 
for  my  more  straightforward  friends. 

It  is  utterly  mistaken  and  not  a  little  tiresome, 
however,  to  believe  that  this  pleasure  is  all  esoteric. 
If  Henry  James  lacks  Biblical  simplicity  it  does  not 
mean  that  he  is  not  the  sincerest  of  the  sincere.  A 
simple  style,  every  one  agrees,  is  the  most  desirable 
thing  in  literature,  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  the 
more  completely  a  man  is  inspired  the  more  simply 
he  expresses  himself.  But  if  a  man  is  in  the  plight 
of  the  analytic,  if  at  the  moment  of  asseveration  he 
is  supremely  conscious  of  the  kind  of  man  it  is  who 

[268] 


is  asseverating,  his  expression  is  bound  to  be  com- 
plex. It  is  this  extreme  self-consciousness,  this  in- 
cessant introspection,  that  baffles  most  readers.  And 
yet  there  is  little  reason  for  being  baffled.  The 
greatest  literature,  no  doubt,  is  the  result  of  a  com- 
pletely confident  interaction  between  head  and  heart, 
the  authentic  utterance  of  perfect  realization.  An 
artist  may  merely  say:  "  The  hare  limp'd  trembling 
through  the  frozen  grass."  But,  so  far  as  that  im- 
pression was  concerned,  he  was  simple  lord  and  mas- 
ter, and  the  result  is  to  make  us  lords  as  well.  But 
if  an  artist  is  constantly  aware  of  the  dubieties  of 
impression,  if  he  is  so  scrupulous  that  he  refuses  to 
give  currency  to  any  impression  without  recording 
the  degree  and  the  circumstance  of  authentication, 
why  should  we  resent  him?  Perhaps  Mr.  James's 
power  to  lose  himself  in  any  conviction  is  meagre. 
Perhaps  his  interest  in  his  emotions  is  sometimes 
monstrously  greater  than  the  emotions  themselves. 
Perhaps  he  weighs  his  little  feelings  too  preciously, 
putting  his  coal  as  well  as  his  gold  in  the  apothe- 
cary's scales.  But  even  if  his  meticulousness  becomes 
impractical  at  times,  becomes  an  accountancy  infi- 
nitely more  delicate  than  life  has  any  use  for,  exhibits 
a  craving  for  adjustment  so  preposterous  that  it 
would  petrify  all  vital  processes  for  its  accomplish- 
ment, the  fact  remains  that  few  have  so  succeeded 
in  submitting  civilized  intercourse  to  justly  sensitive 
analysis.  As  for  sincerity,  it  is  his  god.  If  he 
has  recorded  the  last  ripple  of  his  emotional  pebble 
it  is,  in  his  own  phrase,  "  for  sweet  truth's  sake." 

To  re-read  The  American  Scene  is  to  discover 
how  intensely  valuable  is  just  this  meticulousness. 
Here,  if  anywhere,  we  have  the  later  James,  the  in- 

[  269  ] 


sistent  excoriator,  and  here,  if  anywhere,  a  finikin 
ineptitude  would  be  betrayed.  But  a  faithful  read- 
ing leaves  the  sense  of  a  fine,  inclusive,  meditative 
spirit,  a  man  who  seeks  beauty  first  but  who  seeks 
it  on  the  terms  of  the  familiar  social  comedy  in 
America.  No  one  who  does  justice  to  these  mild  but 
remorseless  discriminations  can  ever  afford  again  to 
deprecate  the  "later  James." 

Take,  for  example,  the  quite  casual  characteriza- 
tions of  New  York  architecture.  Looking  at  the 
Tiffany  building,  Mr.  James  does  not  dismiss  it  as 
a  handsome  reproduction.  To  him  New  York  is  an 
"  ample  childless  mother  who  consoles  herself  for 
her  sterility  by  an  unbridled  course  of  adoption.1' 
He  does  not  baldly  state  that  he  prefers  the  Public 
Library  to  a  skyscraper.  "  Any  building  that,  being 
beautiful,  presents  itself  as  seated  rather  than  as 
standing,  can  do  with  your  imagination  what  it  will; 
you  ask  it  no  question,  you  give  it  a  free  field,  con- 
tent only  if  it  will  sit  and  sit  and  sit."  Similarly  he 
can  hit  off  New  York  in  one  phrase  as  "  all  for- 
midable foreground."  He  can  criticize  its  gridiron 
form  for  its  "  longitudinal  avenues  perpetually,  yet 
meanly,  intersected."  He  can  defend  a  desired 
"  vulgar  "  conformity  on  Riverside  Drive  by  say- 
ing: "A  house-front  so  'amusing'  for  its  personal 
note,  or  its  perversity,  in  a  short  perspective,  may 
amid  larger  elements  merely  dishonor  the  harmony." 
He  can  illuminate  his  own  diminutive  boyhood  in 
New  York  in  a  single  reference  to  "  the  great  dim, 
bleak,  sonorous  dome  of  the  old  Bowery  "  Theatre. 
And  the  clearest  note  in  suburban  architecture  is 
struck  by  his  acute  response  to  the  houses'  "  candid 
look  of  having  cost,  as  much  as  they  knew  how." 

[  270  ] 


Equally  searching  is  his  eye  for  people.  He  took 
a  "  shining  steamer  "  for  Jersey  on  a  summer  after- 
noon, and  drank  in  "  the  immense  liberality  of  the 
Bay  .  .  .  the  gayety  of  the  light,  the  gladness  of  the 
air,  and  above  all  (for  it  most  came  back  to  that) 
the  unconscious  affluence,  the  variety  in  identity,  of 
the  young  men  of  business."  We  get  social  New 
York  at  a  cotillion :  the  "  collective  alertness  of 
bright-eyed,  light-limbed,  clear-voiced  youth,  with- 
out a  doubt  in  the  world  and  without  a  conviction." 
He  discerns  "  its  instinctive  refusal  to  be  brought  to 
book,  its  boundless  liability  to  contagion  and  bound- 
less incapacity  for  attention,  its  ingenuous  blankness 
to-day  over  the  appetites  and  clamors  of  yesterday, 
its  chronic  state  of  besprinklement  with  the  sawdust 
of  its  ripped-up  dolls";  disputable,  if  you  like,  but 
intelligibility  itself.  And  who  else  has  so  discerned 
the  empty  imitativeness  of  "  conspicuous  waste  "  in 
New  York.  In  worlds  otherwise  arranged,  the  oc- 
casion itself  produces  the  tiara.  "  In  New  York  this 
symbol  has,  by  an  arduous  extension  of  its  virtue,  to 
produce  the  occasion." 

Vulgarity  of  various  kinds  arrested  his  musing 
glance.  The  palaces  at  Newport  he  described  in  a 
characteristic  mixed  metaphor  as  "  the  white  ele- 
phants, all  cry  and  no  wool,  all  house  and  no  gar- 
den." The  spoiled  resort  on  the  East  Side  had 
found  "  that  pestilent  favor  of  *  society  '  which  is 
fatal  to  everything  it  touches  and  which  so  quickly 
leaves  the  places  of  its  passage  unfit  for  its  own  use 
and  uninteresting  for  any  other."  He  speaks  of 
"  the  general  grimness  of  the  person  he  deals  with 
over  the  counter."  "  The  wage-earners,  the  toilers 
of  old,  notably  in  other  climes,  were  known  by  the 

[  271  ] 


wealth  of  their  songs;  and  has  it,  on  these  lines,  been 
given  to  the  American  people  to  be  known  by  the 
number  of  their  '  candies  '?  " 

He  dislikes  "  the  little  tales,  mostly  by  ladies,  and 
about  and  for  children  romping  through  the  ruins  of 
the  Language,  in  the  monthly  magazines."  He  sees 
many  points  of  the  Boston  Public  Library  as  "  ad- 
mirable for  a  railway-station."  He  speaks  of  "  the 
Pullmans  that  are  like  rushing  hotels  and  the  hotels 
that  are  like  stationary  Pullmans."  And  in  the  hotel 
there  is  "  the  lone  breakfasting  child  to  reckon  with; 
the  little  pale,  carnivorous,  coffee-drinking  ogre  or 
ogress,  who  prowls  down  in  advance  of  its  elders,  en- 
gages a  table  —  dread  vision !  —  and  has  the  '  run  ' 
of  the  bill  of  fare."  Vulgarity  in  more  flagrant 
form  he  also  notes.  He  met  some  trying  people 
traveling  in  the  same  stage-coach.  "  They  scaled 
the  pinnacle  of  publicity,  and  perched  on  it  flapping 
their  wings." 

But  it  is  not  all  even  so  temperedly  censorious. 
Many  things  he  loved  and  endeared,  and  he  has  a 
tender  avuncular  habit  of  personifying  every  single 
place  that  attracted  him  as  an  appealing  feminine 
presence.  New  Hampshire,  Newport,  Central  Park, 
Charleston,  Florida  —  each  of  these  personalities 
became  for  him  alluringly  feminine.  A  proclivity 
such  as  this  does  not  fail,  in  his  own  pet  word,  to  be 
"  amusing." 

The  beauty  of  America  is  preserved  in  these  pages, 
as  one  might  suppose.  He  could  speak  of  the  Amer- 
ican sky  as  "  often  peeled  of  clouds,  in  the  interest 
of  the  slightly  acid  juice  of  its  light,"  but  there  are 
passages  of  lyrical  tenderness.  "  I  woke  up  in  the 
New  Hampshire  mountains,  in  the  deep  valleys  and 

[  272  ] 


the  wide  woodlands,  on  the  forest-fringed  slopes,  the 
far-seeing  crests  of  the  high  places,  and  by  side  of 
the  liberal  streams  and  the  lonely  lakes." 

Deriving  ideas  from  everything  he  witnessed,  Mr. 
James  read  more  into,  and  got  more  out  of,  demo- 
cratic possibilities  as  he  penetrated  into  America. 
Impatient  of  the  South,  of  its  "  pretense  of  a  social 
order  founded  on  delusions  and  exclusions,"  he  grew 
more  patient,  as  he  remained,  of  the  national  exem- 
plifications. It  is  for  his  sense  of  these  that  The 
American  Scene  is  most  worth  studying,  though  he 
had  sharp  words  to  speak  of  "  bagmen  "  and  sky- 
scrapers, California  and  "  untutored  liberty." 

It  is  nearly  ten  years  old,  The  American  Scene, 
and  by  this  time  it  is  probably  relegated  to  the  top- 
most shelf.  But  it  is  a  mistake  not  to  sit  with  it,  and 
attune  oneself  to  its  moderated  voice.  That  voice 
whispers  inimitable  revelations  —  revelations  which 
Mr.  James's  inferiors  will,  as  time  goes  on,  deliver 
to  us  as  their  own,  with  a  "  punch." 

May  i,  191$. 


[  273  ] 


THE  RUPERT  BROOKE  LEGEND 

ONE  may  guess  what  the  theme  of  Rupert  Brooke 
means  to  Mr.  Henry  James.  His  favored  word 
"  felicity  "  perhaps  sums  it  up.  Here  was  a  youth 
whom  Mr.  James  early  divined.  He  saw  him  first 
at  Cambridge  in  the  splendid  setting  of  the  river  at 
the  "  backs."  At  "  such  a  pitch  of  simple  scenic 
perfection  "  almost  no  personality  could  have  sus- 
tained the  exorbitant  demands  of  Mr.  James's  imag- 
ination. Mr.  James  has  spent  much  of  his  career 
gently  commiserating  with  the  world  on  its  heavy 
failure  to  fulfill  his  delicate  expectancies  for  it.  But 
with  the  figure  and  the  gesture  of  Rupert  Brooke  he 
was  immensely,  mutely  charmed.  Like  a  child  that 
holds  his  breath  lest  he  disturb  a  top  that  is  spinning 
perfectly,  Mr.  James  hovered  above  the  young  poet 
in  a  familial  solicitude.  When  the  top  moved  off 
the  carpet  of  England  on  to  the  hard  boards  of  for- 
eign travel,  Mr.  James  was  in  exquisite  trepidation. 
But  the  spin  was  vigorous.  Through  all  the  gyra- 
tions Mr.  James  at  last  felt  an  unexampled  Tightness. 
He  was  not  merely  contemplating  a  phenomenon 
that  aroused  his  literary  imagination.  He  was  en- 
thralled by  a  performance  that  sustained  and  ful- 
filled his  notions  of  highest  amenity.  It  was  the 
personal,  the  social,  culmination  of  Rupert  Brooke 
that  most  enamored  Mr.  James. 

And  then  to  Rupert  Brooke's  nation  and  tradition 

Letters  from  America,  by  Rupert  Brooke.     Scribners,  New  York. 
[  274  ] 


there  came  an  alien  challenge.  It  was  a  challenge 
that  penetrated  to  the  heart  of  everything  in  civil- 
ized ways  that  had  slowly  and  richly  colored  and 
consecrated  for  Mr.  James.  Without  a  flicker  of 
outside  consideration,  without  a  tremor  of  readjust- 
ment, Rupert  Brooke  took  up  that  challenge  as  his 
own,  willingly  risking  and  losing  his  life.  It  was  not 
a  sacrifice.  It  was,  in  the  light  of  all  unspoken 
preciousness,  a  consummation.  At  their  face,  which 
proved  their  real  value,  it  took  all  the  easy  affirma- 
tions of  his  poetry.  He  had  been  the  frank  heir 
of  a  given  England.  He  had  enjoyed  his  heritage. 
At  the  challenge  he  went  winging  out  of  it,  an  arrow 
from  its  bow.  This  was  more  than  the  allured  spec- 
tator could  have  reckoned  on.  There  would  have 
been  leniency  for  almost  any  behavior.  But  the  hard 
twang  of  Rupert  Brooke's  departure  and  finish  left 
nothing  for  Mr.  James  to  surmise.  Just  because 
he  is  exacting  he  is  capable  of  rejoicing  to  the  full  in 
a  perfection.  So  he  celebrates  the  symbol  of  the 
end. 

It  is  perhaps  even  a  touch  beyond  any  dreamt-of  harmony 
that,  under  omission  of  no  martial  honor,  he  was  to  be  car- 
ried by  comrades  and  devoted  waiting  sharers,  whose  evi- 
dence survives  them,  to  the  steep  summit  of  a  Greek  island 
of  infinite  grace  and  there  placed  in  such  earth  and  amid 
such  beauty  of  light  and  shade  and  embracing  prospect  as 
that  the  fondest  reading  of  his  young  lifetime  could  have 
suggested  nothing  better.  It  struct  us  at  home,  I  mean,  as 
symbolizing  with  the  last  refinement  his  whole  instinct  of 
selection  and  response,  his  relation  to  the  overcharged  appeal 
of  his  scene  and  hour.  How  could  he  have  shown  more 
the  young  English  poetic  possibility  and  faculty  in  which  we 
were  to  seek  the  freshest  reflection  of  the  intelligence  and 
the  soul  of  the  new  generation?  The  generosity,  I  may 

[  275  ] 


fairly  say  the  joy,  of  his  contribution  to  the  general  perfect 
way  makes  a  monument  of  his  high  rest  there  at  the  heart 
of  all  that  was  once  noblest  in  history. 

To  share  completely  this  "  joy  "  the  reader  should, 
I  feel,  be  at  one  with  Mr.  James  in  the  totality  of  his 
sense  of  English  Tightness  and  the  totality  of  his  per- 
sonal sense  of  Rupert  Brooke.  For  this  generous 
effect,  however,  these  letters  from  America  are  thin 
support.  They  were  casual  journalism,  of  course, 
never  meant  to  indemnify  so  lofty  a  memorial  as 
precedes  them.  They  were  addressed,  as  Mr.  James 
says,  with  characteristic  deprecation,  to  "  a  friendly 
London  evening  journal."  But  they  are  part  of  a 
personality  about  to  become  a  legend.  In  so  far  as 
one's  own  imagination  happens  not  to  nourish  a  con- 
viction of  English  *'  exquisitive  civility,"  they  are  re- 
quired to  justify  that  conviction,  or  at  any  rate  to 
corroborate  Mr.  James's  out  of  their  unaided  sub- 
stance. In  the  measure  that  they  fail,  the  outsider 
is  likely  to  modify  "  this  ideal  image  of  English 
youth." 

The  letters  punctuate  a  journey  taken  in  1913. 
It  ran  from  New  York  to  Boston  and  Harvard,  then 
to  Montreal,  Ottawa,  Quebec  and  the  Saguenay,  On- 
tario, Niagara  Falls.  By  Winnipeg  it  went  to  the 
Rockies,  including  an  excursion  to  the  woods,  an  im- 
pression of  the  prairies  and  their  Indian  descend- 
ants. It  went  as  far  afield  as  Samoa  before  record- 
ing the  last  utterance,  the  young  Englishman  re- 
turned to  his  own  country  and  reverberating  to  the 
news  of  war. 

'  Touching  at  first,  inevitably  quite  juvenile,  in 
the  measure  of  his  good  faith  "  —  so  Mr.  James 

[  276  ] 


defines  Rupert  Brooke.  But  conventional  is  the  first 
word  I  should  apply  to  the  poet's  reactions  on,  and 
from,  the  United  States.  It  is  true  he  was  writing 
for  the  Westminster  Gazette.  When  he  announced 
he  was  going  to  trail  his  "  many-colored  mantle  " 
across  the  United  States  his  friends  had  exclaimed 
"My  God!"  "'El  Cuspidorado,'  remarked  an 
Oxford  man,  brilliantly."  "  One  wiser  than  all  the 
rest  wrote :  '  Think  gently  of  the  Americans.  They 
are  so  very  young;  and  so  very  anxious  to  appear 
grown-up;  and  so  very  lovable.''  But  even  with 
such  admonitions  to  remember  and  respect,  there 
was  a  chance  he  might  have  done  more  than  despatch 
to  England  what  he  had  so  clearly  brought  with  him 
out  of  the  vast  fusty  annals  of  prejudice.  Other 
Englishmen  less  recommended  for  amenity,  less  iden- 
tified with  the  "  frequent  extraordinary  beauty  of 
the  English  aspect "  —  H.  G.  Wells,  to  wit,  and 
Arnold  Bennett  and  even  G.  Lowes  Dickinson  —  had 
seen  in  this  Philistia  something  that  probed  for  sym- 
pathy and  understanding.  But  what  Rupert  Brooke's 
so  exalted  tradition  conferred  'was  not  an  ampler 
sympathy  and  a  swifter  understanding.  It  was,  if 
anything,  a  pleasant  though  stuffy  immunity.  He 
did  not  disdain.  He  brightly,  humorously  mirrored. 
But  he  did  not  sufficiently  penetrate.  The  love  of 
truth  in  him  was  not  so  keen  as  to  compel  him  to 
make  profitable  conjecture.  He  was  tolerant,  very, 
but  not  really  receptive.  He  could  observe.  '  The 
upper-class  head  is  long,  often  fine  about  the  fore- 
head and  eyes,  and  very  cleanly  outlined.  The  eyes 
have  an  odd,  tired  pathos  in  them  —  mixed  with  the 
friendliness  that  is  so  admirable  —  as  if  of  a  perpet- 
ual never  quite  successful  effort  to  understand  some- 
[  277  ] 


thing.  It  is  like  the  face  of  an  only  child  who  has 
been  brought  up  in  the  company  of  adults."  But  the 
jocularity  of  Harvard  Commencement  was  aborig- 
inal to  him.  He  might  have  been  a  later  Marius 
beholding  antics  at  once  impossible  and  picturesque. 

He  saw  Niagara  Falls  with  poet's  eyes.  Mont- 
real, Ottawa,  Toronto,  Quebec,  Winnipeg,  he  in- 
spected affably  and  reported  with  friendliness  and 
wit.  But  the  small,  shifty,  cruel,  mean  and  untrust- 
worthy expression  of  the  French  Canadian  priest, 
the  flabby  face,  shifty  eyes,  inhuman  mouth  of  the 
real  estate  youth  in  western  Canada,  the  fabulous 
vulgarity  of  the  fat  Jew  in  Quebec,  were  the  realities 
that  got  deepest  between  his  ribs.  Had  he  not  seen 
the  Saguenay  and  the  Rockies,  had  he  not  kept  on  to 
Samoa,  he  should  have  but  commemorated  nostal- 
gia. The  South  Sea  Islands  captivated  him.  "  Never, 
clearly,  had  he  been  on  such  good  terms  with  the 
hour,  never  found  the  life  of  the  senses  so  anticipate 
the  life  of  the  imagination,  or  the  life  of  the  imag- 
ination so  content  itself  with  the  life  of  the  senses; 
it  is  all  an  abundance  of  amphibious  felicity."  For 
all  the  interestingness  of  his  earlier  chapters,  it  is 
this  chapter,  and  the  concluding  moment  of  reverie 
on  the  declaration  of  war,  that  help  him  abide. 

To  make  a  memorial  to  Brooke's  personality  it  is 
perhaps  well  that  Mr.  James  should  have  testified. 
Brooke  achieved  in  person  that  miracle  of  felicity 
for  which  the  social  scrutinizer  looks  so  widely  and 
so  vainly.  He  had  not  merely  the  grace  of  spirit. 
He  had  also  that  gift  so  unusual  outside  unwarrant- 
able romance,  the  accompanying  grace  of  form.  For 
Mr.  James,  who  had  so  often  detected  genius  without 
amenity  or  amenity  without  genius,  this  happy  child 

[  278  ] 


of  the  English  intention  was  something  he  could  pe- 
culiarly realize.  Whether  his  ecstacy  is  not  too  pri- 
vate, however,  is  a  question  his  intricate  introduction 
arouses.  There  are  passages  in  which  he  seems 
rather  to  contract  his  whole  gratification  to  a  class 
and  a  clime.  This  sort  of  thing  is  petty.  Fine  per- 
sonality is  not  so  esoteric  that  it  requires  such  a  nice 
scenic  and  institutional  equipment.  Had  Mr.  James 
written  a  fifth  gospel  I  have  no  doubt  he  would  have 
been  completely  susceptible.  A  thousand  delicate 
implications  of  beauty  and  nobility  and  supremacy 
would  have  been  unfailingly  traced.  It  may  be  af- 
firmed, however,  that  the  uninformed  took  no  pains 
to  ensure  their  Personality  against  the  ineptitude  of 
the  crude  and  vulgar  man.  They  simply  spread 
Him  on  a  record  and  their  brief  story  has  survived 
for  many  peoples  and  many  ages.  It  is  that  sort  of 
success  for  a  chronicle  of  the  divine  which  makes 
one  wonder  whether  it  is  the  infinitesimal  adjustment 
that  most  signifies,  or  the  clean  bravery  of  the  event. 

February  5,  1916. 


[  279  ] 


POETRY 


1887-19! 5 

FOR  some  years  past  the  work  of  Rupert  Brooke 
was  known  to  a  limited  circle  as  that  of  a  bright  new 
light  in  English  poetry.  With  the  war  he  emerged 
for  a  much  wider  public.  In  the  heyday  of  youth, 
he  immediately  volunteered  for  active  service,  and  he 
went  out  to  meet  war  and  possible  death  with  his 
music  attuned.  Five  heart-searching  dauntless  son- 
nets were  written  in  1914,  previous  to  his  departure 
on  the  expedition  to  the  Dardanelles.  In  the  ^Egean, 
before  he  had  written  again,  it  fell  to  him  to  meet 
one  of  the  advance  claims  of  war.  He  died  of  an 
infection  on  board  a  French  hospital  ship  at  Scyros, 
April  23,  1915.  With  his  end  came  every  emphasis 
on  his  war  poems  and  their  great  vogue  in  England. 
And  now,  for  minds  still  possessed  with  the  thought 
of  his  young  death,  his  complete  work  is  brought  in 
view. 

In  his  lovely  and  tender  lines  on  the  immaculate 
conception  Rupert  Brooke  plays  humorously  with  the 
figure  of  the  Angel  Gabriel.  He  saw  the  heavenly 
messenger  as  proud  and  changeless,  "  radiant,  un- 
troubled in  his  wisdom,  kind,"  but  he  ventured  to 
suggest  the  golden  wire  that  kept  Gabriel's  halo  in 
place.  Any  portrait  that  fixes  his  own  attitude  as 
"  immote,  immortal,"  invites  a  similar  smile.  It  is 
easy,  of  course,  to  understand  the  rapture  he  inspires. 
A  beautiful  soul,  says  an  ancient  critic,  harmonizes 

The  Collected  Poems  of  Rupert  Brooke.    Lane,  New  York. 
[   283   ] 


with  a  beautiful  form,  and  the  two  are  cast  in  one 
mould.  It  is  natural  that  those  who  ever  looked 
even  casually  on  Rupert  Brooke  should  wish  now  to 
emphasize  this  harmony.  The  very  antithesis  of  the 
theatrical  poet,  he  did  not  need  to  be  named  to  be 
noted.  Eyes  of  a  steady,  fathomless  blue  looked  his 
strength  and  sensitiveness.  Clear-featured,  free- 
haired,  sunburnt,  he  was  one  of  the  most  arresting 
and  satisfactorily  handsome  of  men.  But  he  was  not 
a  classic  marble  or  in  love  with  classic  marble.  Ed- 
ward Thomas  speaks  of  him  as  "  a  golden  young 
Apollo."  Walter  de  la  Mare  recalls  "  the  radiance 
and  repose  of  an  immortal."  Gilbert  Murray  says 
that  he  "  typified  the  ideal  radiance  of  youth  and 
poetry."  Winston  Churchill  insists  on  his  "  classic 
symmetry  of  mind  and  body,  ruled  by  high,  undoubt- 
ing  purpose."  Lascelles  Abercrombie  strings  out 
the  words  exquisite,  unforgettable,  supreme,  perfect, 
incomparable,  unspeakably  beautiful.  All  this  seems 
to  make  him  "  a  gold  speck  in  the  gold  skies."  But 
his  work  belies  it.  Like  the  Mary  of  his  poem,  un- 
der his  breast  he  had  "  multitudinous  burnings." 
And  like  her,  he  was  "  pitiful  with  mortality."  To 
forget  that  is  to  miss  the  magic  of  his  swift,  way- 
ward, trenchant,  disdainful,  winning,  reticent,  rev- 
erent spirit. 

He  was  a  singer,  not  an  aspirant  to  song.  Terse, 
compact,  graphic,  he  was  undoubtedly  an  analyst  in 
his  medium.  His  marvelous  gift  for  words  was  not 
all  ebullience.  But  the  power  that  fuses  a  lyric  out 
of  the  conglomerate  of  experience  was  born  in  him. 
He  took  his  impulse  from  his  nature,  not  from  the 
suggestion  of  books.  The  tradition  of  rhymed  form 
he  accepted  completely,  but  he  never  indentured  him- 

[  284  1 


self  to  great  poets.  He  rose  serenely,  as  they  did, 
out  of  the  amateur.  And  if  he  retold  the  fleeting- 
ness of  love,  or  fancied  wooers  turned  to  dust,  or 
held  a  muted  sob  in  words,  or  sharpened  his  wit  on 
religion,  it  was  because  he  conceived  the  poetry  in 
these  things  anew.  Life,  one  may  well  see,  was  not 
easy  for  him.  It  was  not  so  much  that  he  was  born 
into  a  world  of  searchlight  hostesses  and  ladies  im- 
pecunious in  emotion,  a  world  of  tennis  and  chatter 
and  afternoon  tea.  These  he  deflected.  But  he  in- 
herited the  mortgage  of  the  civilized,  the  handicap 
of  tilled  fields  and  paved  roads  and  deliberate  efforts 
at  "  sleeping  out."  No  wonder  he  loved  to  swim 
at  night.  He  had  imagination  and  the  nostalgia  for 
freedom  and  danger  and  magnificence  that  goes  with 
it.  One  is  conscious  of  that  nostalgia  in  him,  the 
ache  of  emptiness,  asking  for  something  more  re- 
sponsive than  the  English  girl  eprise,  something  more 
violent  than  tennis  —  until  the  war.  But  of  all  this, 
strangely  enough,  he  made  verse. 

At  his  highest  moment  Rupert  Brooke  gave  proof 
that  "  the  harmonious  soul  is  both  temperate  and 
courageous,"  yet  the  dissonances  of  his  career  make 
his  final  music  sweeter.  In  these  collected  poems  one 
is  forced  by  his  strict  sincerity  to  observe  the  fluctu- 
ant progress  of  a  spirit,  and  if  it  were  not  for  the 
ache  and  wincing  of  that  spirit,  the  juvenility  and 
self-consciousness,  the  defensive  wit  and  aggressive 
satire,  one  might  believe  that  his  halo  also  was  held 
by  golden  wire. 

Never  that  mere  warbler  who  "  is  melted  and 
softened  beyond  what  is  good  for  him,"  Rupert 
Brooke  was  still  sensuous,  sensitive,  complicated,  in- 
tensely personal.  Too  sophisticated  from  the  be- 

[  285  J 


ginning  to  sing  in  obvious  strains,  he  arrayed  himself 
against  criticism  by  being  critical  himself.  Even 
those  early  poems  conceived  by  the  fledgling  "  on 
the  edge  of  silence,  half  afraid,  waiting  a  sign,"  are 
guarded  against  fatuity,  "  rife  with  magic  and  move- 
ment." But  in  spite  of  his  fine  sophistication  he  was 
too  much  the  experiencer  to  halt  because  ugliness 
and  disregard  afflicted  him,  because  the  hunger  for 
love  preoccupied  him,  because  the  skepticism  of 
youth  compelled  him  to  sing  certainties  when  certi- 
tudes ached  for  acceptance.  He  was  not  the  sort  to 
fail  of  certainties,  however  little  they  were;  but  the 
life  of  the  modern  young  man,  the  life  of  nature  at- 
tained out  of  complexity,  he  was  able  to  reconcile  to 
exquisite  phrase  and  music. 

There  are  many  poems  that  show  his  livingness 
by  exposing  the  bruises  of  broken  flight.  These 
bruises  he  earned.  He  had  in  him  much  of  that 
ferocity  "  which  only  comes  from  spirit,  which,  if 
rightly  educated,  would  give  courage,  but,  if  too  much 
intensified,  is  liable  to  become  hard  and  brutal." 
This  was  a  tendency  in  Brooke.  Jealousy,  Menelaus 
and  Helen,  The  Voice  and  A  Channel  Passage  — 
all  grimly  amusing  —  showed  sensitiveness  ready  to 
inflict  revenge.  And  delightful  as  such  vigor  was 
in  the  midst  of  mawkishness,  it  beat  savagely  against 
a  world  not  concentric  with  desire.  But  he  was  the 
enraptured  as  well  as  the  irreconcilable.  In  Dining- 
Room  Tea  and  Blue  Evening  and  Town  and  Coun- 
try he  could  surely  lift  his  wings. 

His  Phrygian  harmonies,  "  the  strain  of  the  for- 
tunate," had  great  loveliness  in  Grantchester  and 
The  Treasure,  and  The  Great  Lover.  His  Dorian 
harmonies,  "  the  strain  of  the  unfortunate,"  were 

[  286  ] 


more  completely  music  in  Peace,  Safety,  The  Dead, 
The  Soldier.  "  I  want  to  have  one  harmony  war- 
like," said  Plato,  "  to  sound  the  note  or  accent  which 
a  brave  man  utters  in  the  hour  of  danger  and  stern 
resolve,  or  when  his  cause  is  failing,  and  he  is  going 
to  wounds  or  death  or  is  overtaken  by  some  other 
evil,  at  every  such  crisis  meets  the  blows  of  fortune 
with  firm  step  and  a  determination  to  endure."  So 
Rupert  Brooke  sounded  the  accent  of  the  brave. 
Ripe  to  accept  a  destiny,  he  sang  of  it  as  few  men 
have  ever  sung. 

In  the  present  volume  there  is  included  a  sym- 
pathetic and  subtle  estimate  by  George  Edward 
Woodberry,  and  a  capable  biographic  note  by  Miss 
Margaret  Lavington.  There  is  also  a  romantic  por- 
trait. But  neither  these  last,  with  their  unconscious 
stress  on  pathos,  nor  the  final  poems,  should  take 
one  completely  away  from  the  treasures  of  Rupert 
Brooke's  becoming.  For  he  lives  in  these,  and  by 
these  too  he  is  entitled  to  live. 

December  18,  191$. 


VACHEL  LINDSAY 

OOME  people  are  grudging  about  genius  because 
they  are  grudging  about  divinity.  They  do  not  think 
the  common  man  gives  any  pledge  of  divinity.  They 
feel  "  genius  "  is  an  aristocratic  attribute  and  they 
confine  its  attribution  to  the  fit  and  few.  This  kind 
of  worshipfulness  has  its  mean  aspect.  It  is  primi- 
tive and  denigrating.  But  even  those  of  us  who  do 
not  kneel  readily,  who  want  to  say  our  prayers 
standing,  cannot  pretend  that  genius,  the  personality 
which  rises  out  of  the  mediocre  plane  and  lifts  the 
eye  to  azure,  is  a  personality  frequently  met  with  or 
easy  to  be  sure  of.  Glancing  back  down  the  Ameri- 
can vista  that  is  known  to  us,  the  personalities  that 
mark  a  great  way  of  living,  that  catch  the  inner  eye 
and  feed  the  inner  fire,  are  so  infrequent  that  the 
vista  is  still  like  a  shining  street  at  dawn.  There 
are  men  of  genius  in  that  lane  of  the  sun  —  Lincoln, 
Whitman,  Washington,  Emerson,  William  James; 
perhaps  others  whom  people  better  versed  can  sin- 
cerely name.  But  the  begetters  of  the  spirit  of  this 
nation,  the  complete  and  adequate  persons  of  their 
time  who  still  swing  like  stars  in  our  vision,  find 
few  new  companions  to  keep  their  stride. 

It  is  difficult  not  to  smile  when  Miss  Harriet  Mon- 
roe, nervous  guardian  of  the  corn-fed  poetic  chick, 
speaks  of  the  distinguished  Irish  poet  Yeats  "  honor- 
ing "  Vachel  Lindsay  by  particularizing  him  as  "  a 

A   Handy   Guide   to   Beggars,   by   Vachel   Lindsay.     Macmillan, 
New  York. 

[288] 


fellow  craftsman."  Mr.  Yeats  is  indeed  distin- 
guished but  he  did  no  egregious  honor  in  honoring 
this  poet  of  Illinois.  Perhaps  it  was  wonderful 
that  a  listener  to  the  music  that  whispers  in  the 
disengaging  twilight  should  have  caught  the  strange- 
ness of  Lindsay's  ruder  rhythms  —  rhythms  ruder  in 
the  sense  that  orchestra  is  ruder  than  solo,  or  a 
crowd  ruder  than  a  wraith.  But  from  admitting 
Lindsay's  claims  on  Yeats,  obvious  enough  to  any 
one  who  sees  Lindsay's  dimensions,  it  is  a  long  way 
to  predicting  or  proclaiming  the  fullness  of  his  pow- 
ers. Genius  is  a  large  word  and  to  be  used  warily. 
It  is  enough  perhaps,  to  say  that  here  is  an  emerging 
figure,  a  figure  youthful  and  powerful,  stone  taking 
wings. 

Against  Vachel  Lindsay  there  is  something  to  urge. 
"  Righteousness,"  he  says  in  the  preface  of  this  book, 
"  is  as  filthy  rags."  Yet  in  his  poetry  there  is,  if 
not  much  righteousness,  much  dualism  of  the  kind 
that  John  Dewey  has  characterized.  "  There  is  no 
greater  tragedy,"  says  Mr.  Dewey,  "  than  that  so 
much  of  the  professedly  spiritual  and  religious 
thought  of  the  world  has  emphasized  the  two  ideals 
of  self-sacrifice  and  spiritual  self-perfecting  instead 
of  throwing  its  weight  against  this  dualism  of  life." 
Mr.  Lindsay  is  very  much  a  moralizing  poet  and  in 
his  morality  there  is  a  great  suspiciousness  of  the 
devil,  the  flesh  and  the  world.  "  No  clean  human 
passion  my  rhyme  would  arraign,"  he  says  of  the 
Russian  dancer;  but  the  apogee  of  The  Firemen's 
Ball  is  the  rage  of  desire.  "  By  absence  of  passion, 
he  is  made  free."  The  same  simplicity  of  morality 
comes  into  his  poems  on  the  war  —  "a  curse  upon 
each  King  "  —  and  into  his  poem  on  Omar  Khay- 

[  289  ] 


yam,  "  a  book  of  the  snares  of  earth."  The  indig- 
nation of  the  verses  against  white  slavery,  against 
the  United  States  Senate,  "  swine  within  the  Senate," 
and  the  contrary  celebration  of  John  P.  Altgeld  do 
one  good.  But  it  is  an  expensive  orgy  when  one 
thinks  of  the  "  shining  universal  church,"  the  "  angel- 
song,"  the  world  of  moral  Dutch  Cleanser  and  spirit- 
ual Sapolio,  in  which  the  poet  richly  rejoices.  His 
idea  of  "  a  land  transfigured  "  is  a  dreadful  one.  It 
is  a  sort  of  perpetual  World's  Fair  and  Christmas 
card  and  Sunday  School  picnic  rolled  into  one.  Sa- 
cred capitals,  clean  temples,  millions  of  boats  pad- 
dled by  angels  with  silver  oars  on  a  festive  lagoon, 
"  and  silken  pennants  that  the  sun  shines  through  " 
—  his  heart  bounds  with  zeal  at  this  vision.  "  Sages 
and  sibyls  now,  and  athletes  clean,  Rulers  of  empires, 
and  of  forests  green !  "  —  these  throng  his  paradise. 
And  he  thinks  happily  of  "  halls  with  statues  in 
white  stone  to  saints  unborn  to-day."  "  Creed  upon 
creed,  cult  upon  cult,"  "  shrine  after  shrine  "  —  he 
craves  incense,  ritual,  censers;  he  has  an  enormous 
appetite  for  communal  buildings  gleaming  in  a  com- 
munal sun.  This  is  a  side  of  his  inspiration  which 
leaves  the  present  writer  cold,  though  one  of  his 
finest  poems  is  religious,  Heart  of  God. 

O  great  heart  of  God 

Once  vague  and  lost  to  me, 

Why  do  I  throb  with  your  throb  to-night, 

In  this  land,  eternity? 

O  little  heart  of  God 
Sweet  intruding  stranger, 
You  are  laughing  in  my  human  breast, 
A  Christ-child  in  a  manger. 
[  290  ] 


Heart,  dear  heart  of  God, 

Beside  you  now  I  kneel, 

Strong  heart  of  faith.     O  heart  not  mine, 

Where  God  has  set  His  seal. 

Wild  thundering  heart  of  God 

Out  of  my  doubt  I  come, 

And  my  foolish  feet  with  prophets'  feet, 

March  with  the  prophets'  drum. 

The  beauty  that  is  in  this  poem  is  not  the  clamant 
beauty  of  The  Congo  and  General  Booth  and  the 
unpublished  poems  that  Mr.  Lindsay  recited  to  many 
audiences  last  spring.  But  where  the  recited  poems 
often  need  Mr.  Lindsay's  reading,  as  a  roll  of  film- 
needs  the  instrument  to  project  it,  there  are  many 
poems  like  Heart  of  God,  not  glorious  boom,  boom, 
boomelays  or  clang,  clang,  clangelays,  that  live  for 
a  solitary  reader.  It  is  characteristic  of  Mr.  Lind- 
say that  he  does  not  always  write  for  solitude.  As 
Adventures  While  Preaching  the  Gospel  of  Beauty 
attested,  and  as  this  present  volume  now  attests,  he 
has  his  fullest  being  in  association  with  fortuitous 
crowds,  people  in  the  common  ways  of  life,  people 
addressed  and  trusted  as  imaginative,  and  all  born 
attuned  to  poems  that  have  in  them  the  beat  of  the 
waves  of  the  blood.  Were  one  asked  by  Mr.  Lind- 
say if  it  were  possible  to  go  through  Florida  and 
Georgia  and  North  Carolina,  New  Jersey  and  Penn- 
sylvania, Missouri  and  Kansas,  reading  poems  to 
pore  white  trash  and  blockade  whisky  Americans  and 
old  Southern  ladies  and  railroad  conductors  and  col- 
lege boys  and  undertakers  and  farmhands  and  pious 
grandfathers  and  Mennonites  and  livery-stable  keep- 
ers and  stackers  in  the  harvest-fields  —  one  might 

[  291  ] 


have  doubts  as  to  the  value  or  even  the  expedience 
of  his  mission.  But  because  he  has  vigor  and  cour- 
age, a  hunger  for  romance  whetted  by  years  of  life 
in  Springfield,  Illinois,  a  yearning  for  enchantment 
in  the  face  of  American  flatness,  he  has  been  able 
to  find  in  the  hills  and  fields  of  the  South  and  the 
plains  of  the  West  many  deep  and  dear  responses  to 
his  searching  heart.  Not  always  is  one  satisfied  with 
his  playfulness.  He  is  too  strenuously  the  sprightly 
poet,  the  humorsome  disciple  of  St.  Francis,  the  reso- 
lute adventurer  insisting  on  a  picturesque  world. 
But  such  strictures  are  not  final.  A  Handy  Guide 
to  Beggars  is  too  varied  to  be  invalidated  by  any 
one  squeamish  reaction  to  it.  It  is  much  too  full 
of  loveliness  and  fun,  happy  invention  and  sudden 
shivering  song,  to  be  disregarded  because  young  Illi- 
nois feels  he  ought  to  feel  like  a  fighting-cock  and 
starts  to  crow  without  showing  cause. 

I  say  loveliness.  There  is  the  family  in  the  Blue 
Ridge.  Lindsay  describes  it  and  the  people  in  it, 
"  nothing  to  remind  one  of  the  world  this  side  of 
Beowulf."  "  An  inner  door  opened.  It  was  plain 
the  woman  who  stood  there  was  his  wife.  She  had 
the  austere  mouth  a  wife's  passion  gives.  She  had 
the  sweet  white  throat  of  her  youth,  that  made  even 
the  candle-flame  rejoice.  She  looked  straight  at  me, 
with  ink-black  eyes.  She  was  dumb,  like  some  one 
struggling  to  awake."  These  people  have  bad  news 
while  their  guest  is  with  them.  A  brother  brings 
word  that  the  host's  mother  is  ill.  There  is  the 
host's  refrain:  "  I  can't  think  of  anything  except  my 
dying  mother.  I  can't  think  of  anything  except 
mother  is  going  to  die."  In  the  morning  Lindsay 
leaves  with  this  emotion :  "  A  money-claim  has  defi- 

[  292  ] 


nite  limits,  but  when  will  you  ever  discharge  your 
obligation  to  the  proud  and  the  fine  in  the  House  of 
the  Doom?  You  intruded  on  their  grief.  Yet  they 
held  their  guest  sacred  as  their  grief." 

The  fun  of  A  Handy  Guide  for  Beggars  plays 
over  special  incidents  and  general  conclusions. 
There  Is  the  general  conclusion  as  to  the  tramp  and 
his  Missions.  "  A  mission,  an  institution  built  by 
speed-maniacs  who  use  automobiles  for  speed-mani- 
acs who  use  box-cars."  The  special  incident  of  a 
hideous  coal  town  is  amusing.  "  I'm  awful  glad  to 
see  a  white  man,"  confesses  his  host.  "  This  place 
is  full  of  Bohunks,  and  Slavs,  and  Rooshians,  and 
Poles  and  Lickershes  (Lithuanians?).  They're  not 
bad  to  have  around,  but  they  ain't  Cawcasians. 
They  all  talk  Eyetalian."  He  read  his  poetry  to 
that  family.  "  No,  kind  and  flattering  reader,  it 
was  not  above  their  heads.  Earnestness  is  earnest- 
ness everywhere.  The  whole  circle  grasped  that  I 
really  expected  something  unusual  of  those  boys  with 
the  black-diamond  eyes,  no  matter  what  kind  of  per- 
versity was  in  them  at  present.  I  ...  dreamed 
that  this  ungoverned  strength  before  me,  that  had 
sprung  from  the  loins  of  King  Coal,  might  some  day 
climb  high,  that  these  little  wriggling,  dirty-fisted 
grandsons  of  that  monarch  might  yet  make  the  world 
some  princely  reparation  for  his  crimes.  After  the 
reading  the  mother  and  father  said  solemnly,  '  it  is 
a  good  book.'  ' 

Here  is  one  of  the  poems  Mr.  Lindsay  read: 

LINCOLN 

Would  I  might  rouse  the  Lincoln  in  you  all, 
That  which  is  gendered  in  the  wilderness, 
From  lonely  prairies  and  God's  tenderness. 

[  293  ] 


Imperial  soul,  star  of  a  weedy  stream, 
Born  where  the  ghosts  of  buffaloes  still  dream, 
Whose  spirit  hoof-beats  storm  above  his  grave, 
About  that  breast  of  earth  and  prairie-fire  — 
Fire  that  freed  the  slave. 

No  one  who  fails  to  read  this  travel  book  should 
believe  that  he  knows  Vachel  Lindsay  or  all  fine 
things  that  American  literature  has  to  show.  Lind- 
say makes  New  Jersey  no  less  poetic  than  Georgia. 
Democracy  is  not  with  him  a  phrase.  It  is  some- 
thing poignant  of  the  people.  It  supposes  an  ab- 
sence of  classes,  a  conjunction  of  all  kinds  of  hu- 
man beings.  It  is  that  faith  in  the  excellence  of 
human  beings  which  makes  life  worth  living.  It 
finds  that  excellence  by  inclusiveness.  It  is  different 
from  any  other  and  all  other  religions.  It  has  at 
root  a  kind  relation  to  God  because  it  has  a  kind 
relation  to  man.  It  is  more  than  liberty,  equality 
and  fraternity.  It  is  a  feeling  that  the  mortal  planet 
is  a  good  and  decent  place  to  live  in  and  on.  It  is 
the  thing  Lincoln  had.  It  is  the  thing  Whitman 
had.  It  is  the  thing  Emerson  partly  had.  It  is  the 
thing  that  the  West  has,  and  not  the  East  so  much, 
the  thing  that  the  Negro  took  away  from  the  South 
and  yet  the  thing  that  abides,  though  not  singularly, 
in  America.  It  is  the  thing  that  elects  one  man 
president  rather  than  another  in  time  of  war.  It 
may  be  religious.  Perhaps  it  is.  It  comes  down 
from  the  mountains,  it  walks  among  the  people^  it 
plows  through  snow  to  say  who  shall  be  president. 
Of  course  Lindsay  is  too  simple  about  books.  He 
is  not  fair  to  the  men  who  do  not  live  among  sense 
impressions.  He  is  not  fair  to  the  men  who  give 
their  lives  to  truth,  the  doctors,  the  men  of  letters, 

[  294  ] 


the  lawyers,  the  men  who  strive  for  balance,  the 
men  who  will  not  gamble  their  lives,  like  the  har- 
vesters. He  has  crude  gestures,  this  emerging  poet 
of  Illinois.  He  has  intonations  of  the  preacher  and 
fancifulness  of  the  infant  wearing  a  paternal  silk 
hat.  He  finds  it  hard  to  forget  Hathor,  the  Rose  of 
Sharon  and  ambrosial  nouns.  He  forces  his  note. 
But  to  say  these  things  is  not  to  reach  the  kernel. 
Where  else  in  this  country  of  emergence  is  there  in 
combination  nationalism  so  free  and  swinging,  reli- 
gion so  vigorous,  human  contact  so  unprejudiced, 
beauty  so  adored?  Sometimes  it  is  the  adoration  of 
beauty  we  attend  at,  mere  services  in  her  name.  But 
not  seldom  he  is  at  the  heart  of  conviction  and 
ecstasy  and  splendor.  The  man  who  tramped  as  a 
beggar  through  our  states  could  afford  to  go  light 
because  of  his  affluence.  He  had  every  man  for  his 
comrade.  He  went  afoot  with  a  people.  He 
marched  with  the  moon  and  the  sun. 

November  18,  1916. 


I  295  ] 


NEW  GROUND 

you  twitch  your  ears  for  a  small  boy  you 
create  a  special  and  apparently  inexhaustible  crav- 
ing. You  cease  to  be  an  ordinary  human  being  in 
that  boy's  eyes,  you  become  an  incarnated  ear- 
twitcher.  The  sole  justification  for  your  existence, 
as  he  sees  it,  is  your  delicious  faculty  for  twitching 
your  ears.  In  this  respect  the  small  boy  is  not  un- 
like the  American  people.  The  American  people  is 
not  quite  so  simply  pleased  but  if  you  once  do  deeply 
please  it,  if  you  once  become  identified  in  its  vague 
monstrous  mind  with  any  particular  gesture  or  in- 
tonation, you  cannot  get  much  response  from  it  ex- 
cept by  duplicating  the  performance  that  aroused 
and  fixed  its  taste.  You  may  not  wish  to  repeat  it. 
You  may,  like  Peter  Dunne  or  Mark  Twain  or 
George  Barr  McCutcheon  or  O.  Henry,  have  a  few 
little  intentions  of  your  own.  But  there  is  some- 
thing slow  and  obdurate  about  the  public.  Like  a 
horse,  it  is  hard  for  it  to  form  an  idea.  Once 
formed,  an  idea  is  a  devil's  pitchfork  in  its  brain. 

Because  of  this  trait  in  the  public  Songs  and 
Satires  will  probably  be  disappointing.  In  Spoon 
River  Anthology  Mr.  Masters  did  more  than  write 
poetry.  He  presented  his  poetic  themes  in  a  way 
peculiarly  dramatic.  His  method,  obviously,  made 
for  striking  success  with  the  public,  and  it  created 
the  notion  that  as  an  inventor  of  method  Edgar  Lee 

Songs  and  Satires,  by  Edgar  Lee  Masters.    Macmillan,  New  York. 


Masters  stood  supreme.  Only  a  madman  would 
have  harped  on  the  original  device,  and  Mr.  Masters 
is  not  a  madman.  In  the  absence  of  another 
startling  device,  however,  he  has  not  the  same  salt 
of  novelty,  and  those  who  savored  just  the  novelty 
in  Spoon  River  will  undoubtedly  deem  Songs  and 
Satires  flat. 

Mr.  Masters,  however,  is  the  same  Mr.  Masters. 
Different  in  method  and  varied  in  theme,  Songs  and 
Satires  is  penetrated  with  the  same  quality  as  Spoon 
River  Anthology.  And  because  Mr.  Masters  is  a 
deep  poetic  spirit,  one  of  the  greatest  in  the  America 
of  our  time,  it  would  be  an  immense  pity  if  the  ab- 
sence of  a  certain  special  excitement  should  keep  the 
readers  of  Songs  and  Satires  from  finding  the  treas- 
ures inside. 

As  to  the  essential  Mr.  Masters  there  are  various 
opinions.  Out  of  Loudonville,  Ohio,  there  recently 
came  one  unspoiled  opinion,  straight  from  a  suffer- 
ing heart.  "  Spoon  River,"  said  the  Loudonvillian, 
u  is  not  life, —  it  is  death.  It  does  not  present  life 
truly,  wholesomely.  It  does  not  satisfy  the  de- 
mands of  the  poetic  nature.  It  is  too  earthly.  It 
creeps  like  a  reptile  through  slime  and  evil.  We  are 
depressed;  our  imagination  is  destroyed,  and  we 
close  the  book  with  a  disgust  for  its  vulgarity. 
There  is  life  in  this  book,  say  what  you  will.  But  it 
contains  none  of  the  '  noble  and  profound  applica- 
tions of  ideas  to  life.' ' 

At  this  opinion  one  may  imagine  Mr.  Masters 
himself  lightly  smiling.  One  may  imagine  admirers 
and  advocates  of  his  receiving  it  with  wrath.  But 
why  should  a  poet,  a  fine  poet,  so  disgust  and  de- 
press and  perplex?  Why  should  he  seem  slimy  and 

[  297  ] 


vulgar  and  unwholesome?  Mr.  Masters  is  big 
enough  to  make  any  attempt  at  a  reasonable  answer 
worth  while. 

The  best  man  to  answer,  so  far  as  I  know,  would 
be  Thorstein  Veblen.  If  one  thinks  Masters  big  as 
a  poet,  it  would  be  feeble  not  to  apply  that  word 
or  some  more  eulogistic  word  to  Veblen  as  a  social 
analyst.  The  confusions  that  arise  about  Mr.  Mas- 
ters are  due  to  his  arrival  on  the  stage  at  a  period 
of  economic  and  moral  transition.  For  the  right 
clues  to  this  transitional  period  there  is  no  observer 
so  fertile,  so  brilliant,  so  inexorably  honest  as  the 
author  of  The  Theory  of  Business  Enterprise. 

What  the  man  from  Loudonville  is  butting  into, 
in  Spoon  River  and  Songs  and  Satires,  has  a  quite 
terrific  name.  It  is,  in  the  jargon  beloved  of  Mr. 
Veblen,  "  the  cultural  incidence  of  the  machine  proc- 
ess." Under  the  circumstances,  evidently,  the 
Ohioan  kept  his  temper  remarkably  well.  The  dif- 
ference between  him  and  Mr.  Masters  is  a  consider- 
able difference.  It  is  a  difference,  using  another 
catchword,  in  "  norms  of  validity."  The  Ohioan's 
norms  rest  "  on  conventional,  ultimately  sentimental 
grounds;  they  are  of  a  putative  nature.  Such  are, 
e.g.,  the  principles  of  (primitive)  blood  relationship, 
clan  solidarity,  paternal  descent,  Levitical  cleanness, 
divine  guidance,  allegiance,  nationality."  Being  an 
honest,  conventional  man,  he  argues  de  jure.  His 
characteristic  habits  of  thought  are  "  habits  of  re- 
course to  conventional  grounds  of  finality  or  validity, 
to  anthropomorphism,  to  explanations  of  phenomena 
in  terms  of  human  relation,  discretion,  authenticity, 
and  choice.  The  final  ground  of  certainty  in  in- 
quiry on  this  natural-rights  plane  is  always  a  ground 

[  298  ] 


of  authenticity,  of  precedent,  or  accepted  decision." 
He  is,  in  short,  a  normal  "  conservative  "  man,  and 
his  disgust  and  distress  over  Mr.  Masters  is  due  to 
the  fact  that  Mr.  Masters  is  one  of  the  first  poets  to 
become  really  articulate  in  a  civilization  affected  by 
the  machine. 

"  On  the  whole,"  says  Mr.  Veblen,  "  the  number 
and  variety  of  things  that  are  fundamentally  a-nd 
eternally  true  and  good  increase  as  one  goes  outward 
from  the  modern  West-European  cultural  centers 
into  the  earlier  barbarian  past  or  into  the  remoter 
barbarian  present."  Loudonville,  in  this  connection, 
stands  for  the  remoter  barbarian  present;  and  Mr. 
Masters  for  the  number  and  variety  of  things  that 
are  decreasingly  good  and  true. 

It  is  no  wonder  that  Mr.  Masters  is  out  of  touch 
with  many  sincere  Americans.  He  is  breaking  new 
ground  poetically,  ground  that  "  is  neither  ecclesi- 
astic, dynastic,  territorial,  nor  linguistic;  it  is  indus- 
trial and  materialistic."  One  discerns  all  through 
Songs  and  Satires  that  this  has  come  to  pass.  Mr. 
Masters  belongs  definitely  to  an  age  and  sphere  that 
has  new  habits  of  thought.  It  is  dissonant  with  fine 
literary  tradition.  But  those  whose  experience  and 
sympathies  have  been  similar  to  Mr.  Masters's,  can 
see  that  it  is  not  his  personality  alone  which  gives 
the  troublous  accent  to  his  work. 

"  The  machine  process  throws  out  anthropo- 
morphic habits  of  thought."  '  The  machine  proc- 
ess gives  no  insight  into  questions  of  good  and  evil, 
merit  and  demerit,  except  in  point  of  material  caus- 
ation, nor  into  the  foundations  or  the  constraining 
force  of  law  and  order,  except  such  mechanically  en- 
forced law  and  order  as  may  be  stated  in  terms  of 
[  299  ] 


pressure,  temperature,  velocity,  tensile  strength,  etc. 
The  machine  technology  takes  no  cognizance  of  con- 
ventionally established  rules  of  precedence;  it  knows 
neither  manners  nor  breeding  and  can  make  no  use 
of  any  of  the  attributes  of  worth."  '  The  machine 
is  a  leveler,  a  vulgarizer,  whose  end  seems  to  be  the 
extirpation  of  all  that  is  respectable,  noble,  and  dig- 
nified in  human  intercourse  and  ideals."  "  To  the 
technologist  the  process  comes  necessarily  to  count, 
not  simply  as  the  interval  of  functioning  of  an  initial 
efficient  cause,  but  as  the  substantial  fact  that  engages 
his  attention.  .  .  .  The  process  is  always  complex; 
always  a  delicately  balanced  interplay  of  forces  that 
work  blindly,  insensibly,  heedlessly.  .  .  .  The  prime 
efficient  cause  falls,  relatively,  into  the  background 
and  yields  precedence  to  the  process  as  the  point  of 
technological  interest." 

Taking  these  bits  from  Mr.  Veblen,  torn  bleeding 
from  their  context,  the  question  is  whether  Songs  and 
Satires  does  really  in  any  way  correspond.  For  the 
most  part,  as  I  see  it,  it  does  correspond.  It  is  not 
in  one  poem  that  Mr.  Masters  seems  to  me  to  repre- 
sent that  modern  population  which  Veblen  calls 
iconoclastic  and  materialistic.  It  is  in  the  general 
temper  and  animus  he  has  about  life.  That  popu- 
lation is  said  to  be  "  growing  more  matter-of-fact  in 
their  thinking,  less  romantic,  less  idealistic  in  their 
aspirations,  less  bound  by  metaphysical  considera- 
tions in  their  view  of  human  relations,  less  mannerly, 
less  devout."  They  have  here  a  poet  who  shares 
their  habits  of  thought.  It  does  not  matter  whether 
Mr.  Masters  is  writing  a  poem  about  motherhood 
or  Godhead,  about  Bryan  or  St.  Francis,  about  mor- 
tality or  Jesus  or  the  Loop  or  romantic  love.  He 

[  300  ] 


may  supplicate  the  Lord  or  eulogize  Simon  Sur- 
named  Peter  or  brood  over  Dead  Faces  or  sing  of  a 
mistress  In  Michigan,  but  in  every  case  his  "  norms 
of  validity  "  are  the  norms  of  a  new  manner  of  feel- 
ing and  thinking,  a  manner  to  which  most  of  us  are 
not  habituated,  a  manner  which  it  is  sheer  delight 
to  find  so  beautifully  sung. 

If  a  man  fail  as  artist  one  resents  especially  any 
difference  in  his  habit  of  thought.  A  machine- 
process  version  of  the  Jesus  story,  in  which  the 
savior  is  a  buoyant  radical  fighting  the  Bar  Associ- 
ation and  the  Civic  Federation,  might  easily  be  an 
exasperation  or  a  joke.  But  when  one  has  come  to 
it  after  the  wit  of  the  poem  on  Bryan,  the  sense  of 
human  process  in  So  We  Grew  Together,  the  agony 
of  In  the  Car,  the  humanity  of  Simon  Surnamed 
Peter,  "  one  of  our  flesh,"  one  is  acclimated  and  has 
sympathy  to  spare.  So  it  is  with  the  conversation 
between  man  and  God  on  the  subject  of  electrons,  or 
the  Michigan  Avenue  mistress  In  a  Cage.  So  it  is 
with  the  mordant  Arabel  and  the  eloquent  bitterness 
of  The  Helping  Hand,  and  the  portrait  of  William 
Marion  Reedy,  unless  you  happen  to  be  the  person 
the  poet  calls  "  dung." 

When  a  man  chooses  to  write  poetry  about  funda- 
mental themes,  about  love  and  God  and  death  and 
pain  and  sorrow  and  war  and  failure  and  desire  and 
spring,  he  cannot  let  his  feelings  come  through  those 
poems  unless  he  has  accepted  a  way  of  taking  life. 
Mr.  Masters  is  a  man  of  forty  or  so,  skeptical,  un- 
sentimental, unloyal,  deharmonized.  Against  faith 
in  anything  but  a  vague  "  radicalism  "  and  the  evi- 
dence of  his  senses  he  reacts  vigorously.  He  is  not 
merely  rational,  like  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
[  3oi  ] 


He  writes  of  men  de  facto  with  a  strong  refusal  to 
explain  them  or  at  any  rate  explain  them  away. 
The  exciting  thing,  however,  is  to  discover  how  a 
world  so  remorseless  and  harsh  can  sing  to  the  ear 
of  this  poet,  how  phenomena  so  little  ameliorated 
can  be  so  rich  in  communicable  feeling.  There  are 
"  silences,"  of  course.  Love  is  a  Madness  is  a  si- 
lence. What  You  Will  is  a  silence.  Arabel,  A 
Study,  Portrait  of  a  Woman,  bespeak  inexplicable 
processes  and  moods.  The  ballads  of  Launcelot 
are  archaic  tapestries.  St.  Francis  and  Lady  Clare 
is  more  intentional  but  hardly  more  affirmative. 
The  Altar,  like  For  a  Dance,  is  a  jeweled  song. 
But  the  main  tenor  of  the  volume  is  to  affirm  as 
lyrical  and  beautiful  in  their  own  way  the  new  norms 
of  validity,  the  only  norms  that  this  age  is  likely  to 
know.  O  Glorious  France  is  less  characteristic, 
more  obviously  "  noble  and  profound."  It  is  a 
paean  to  men  not  Chicagoan,  "  prophetic  and  enrap- 
tured souls."  But  it  stands  almost  alone. 

A  mixture  of  narrative  and  dissertation  is  com- 
mon in  Mr.  Masters.  He  employs  it  in  matter-of- 
fact  idiom  in  most  of  his  longer  poems,  in  swinging 
verses  elsewhere: 

So  he  stepped  from  the  Sun  in  robes  of  flame 
As  the  city  woke  from  sleep. 
He  walked  the  markets,  he  walked  the  squares, 
He  walked  the  places  of  sweets  and  snares, 
Where  men  buy  honor  and  barter  shame, 
And  the  weak  are  killed  as  sheep. 

The  shorter  lyrics,  of  which  there  are  many,  are 
nearly  all  rhymed.  But  there  is  one  unrhymed  lyric, 
The  Altar,  with  these  words  in  it: 

[  302  ] 


Thy  face  is  the  apple  tree  in  bloom ; 

Thine  eyes  the  glimpses  of  green  water 

When  the  tree's  blossoms  shake 

As  soft  winds  fan  them. 

Thy  hair  is  flame  blown  against  the  sea's  mist  — 

Thou  art  spring. 

Another  use  of  rhyme  in  narrative  may  be  illus- 
trated from  In  the  Cage : 

For  dancing  you  have  cast 
Veil  after  veil  of  ideals  or  pretense 
With  which  men  clothe  the  being  feminine 
To  satisfy  their  lordship  or  their  sense 
Of  ownership  and  hide  the  things  of  sin  — 
You  have  thrown  them  aside  veil  after  veil ; 
And  there  you  stand  unarmored,  weirdly  frail, 
Yet  strong  as  nature,  making  comical 
The  poems  and  the  tales  of  woman's  fall  .  .  . 
You  nod  your  head,  you  smile,  I  feel  the  air 
Made  by  the  closing  door.     I  lie  and  stare 
At  the  closed  door.     One,  two,  your  tufted  steps 
Die  on  the  velvet  of  the  outer  hall. 
You  have  escaped. 

"  Why  life  hurts  so  "  is  not  the  male's  normal 
inquiry.  But  in  his  Portrait  of  a  Woman,  a  woman 
of  whitened  hair,  Mr.  Masters  is  unwontedly  tender: 

You  seem  to  me  the  image  of  all  women 
Who  dream  and  keep  under  smiles  the  grief  thereof, 
Or  sew,  or  sit  by  windows,  or  read  books 
To  hide  their  Secret's  looks.  .  .  . 
Perhaps  your  pathos  means  that  it  is  well 
Death  in  his  time  the  aspiring  torch  inverts, 
And  all  tired  flesh  and  haunted  eyes  and  hands 
Moving  in  pained  whiteness  are  put  under 
The  soothing  earth  to  brighten  April's  wonder. 
[  303  ] 


In  these  forty-five  poems,  half  of  them  fairly  long, 
there  are  not  more  than  a  dozen  unrhymed  verses. 
If  one  can  speak  of  technique  apart  from  the  sum 
of  a  poem,  Songs  and  Satires  is  technically  remark- 
able. But  the  supple  and  diversified  method  is  only 
a  sign  of  the  nature  finding  voice. 

April  29,  1916. 


[  304  ] 


ILLUMINATIONS 

\\  E  seem  to  be  getting  new  popular  notions  as  to 
rhythm.  It  is  not  so  very  long  since  Ruskin  raged 
about  Wagner  pretty  much  as  he  raged  about 
Whistler.  It  was  the  correct  philistine  performance 
to  resist  the  rhythm  of  Wagner  and  set  him  down  as 
noise.  People  have  already  forgotten  this  senseless 
conservation.  The  conceptions  of  dance  rhythm  and 
verse  rhythm  have  similarly,  recently,  emancipated 
themselves.  For  many  years  the  dancing  "  master  " 
had  complete  charge  of  the  thing  called  choreog- 
raphy, and  he  cared  for  nothing  but  the  most  regular 
rhythms.  In  poetry  it  was  practically  the  same. 
"  Hey  diddle-diddle,  the  cat  and  the  fiddle,  the  cow 
jumped  over  the  moon  "  —  the  sublimations  of  this 
rhythm  were  enjoyed  as  "  real "  music,  especially 
when  achieved  by  the  great  Algernon  Charles,  and 
fun  was  made  of  Walt  Whitman.  It  was  not  felt 
then  so  much  as  now  that  whatever  the  beauty 
of  Swinburne's  rhythms  Whitman's  had  their  own 
beauty,  to  which  every  ear  could  become  attuned. 
The  wonder  now  is  that  everyone  did  not  perceive 
right  off  that  the  modern  flexibility  in  verbal  rhythm 
was  no  more  extraordinary  than  the  flexibility  in  the 
rhythm  of  dancer  or  sculptor  or  painter  or  musician. 
The  free  rhythms  of  Mr.  Carl  Sandburg  are  a  fine 
achievement  in  poetry.  No  one  who  reads  Chicago 
Poems  with  rhythm  particularly  in  mind  can  fail  to 

Chicago  Poems,  by  Carl  Sandburg.     Holt,   New  York. 
C   305   ] 


recognize  how  much  beauty  he  attains  in  this  regard. 
But  the  more  arresting  aspect  of  Mr.  Sandburg's 
achievement  is,  for  myself,  the  so-called  imagistic 
aspect;  the  aspect,  that  is  to  say,  which  the  subject- 
matter  itself  reveals.  The  rhythm,  one  may  insist, 
is  part  of  the  imagism  —  one  may  resent  having 
the  so-called  subject-matter  considered  separately. 
Rhythm,  however,  is  far  from  the  dominant  novelty 
in  Carl  Sandburg,  and  it  is  convenient  to  assume 
that  his  rhythms  are  delectable  to  many  who  yet  do 
not  admit  the  beauty  or  originality  of  his  way  of 
approaching  the  world. 

The  originality  of  the  imagist  approach  can 
scarcely  be  long  disputed.  Never  before  has  there 
been  such  firm  seizure  of  the  object  to  be  presented. 
Never  before  has  the  impression  of  the  moment 
been  so  poignantly  dramatized.  Make  a  contrast, 
for  example,  between  the  Anacreon  verse  on  an  old 
man  and  the  Sandburg  verse  on  a  baby.  One  is  a 
brief  description,  the  other  a  brief  characterization. 
The  comparison  is  not  on  all  fours  but  at  least  it  is 
suggestive  of  just  that  quality  in  the  modern  poet 
which  is  making  imagism  what  it  is.  Take  the  old 
man  first: 

Gray  are  my  temples  long  since  and  snowy  my  hair : 
Gracious  youth  is  departed ;  old  are  my  teeth, 
Brief  is  the  space  of  sweet  life  that  is  left  to  me  now. 

Mr.  Sandburg's  verse  runs  this  way: 

The  child's  wonder 
At  the  old  moon 
Comes  back  nightly. 
She  points  her  finger 
To  the  far,  silent,  yellow  thing 
[  306  ] 


Shining  through  the  branches 

Filtering  on  the  leaves  a  golden  sand, 

Crying  with  her  little  tongue,  "  See  the  moon !  " 

And  in  her  bed  fading  to  sleep 

With  babblings  of  the  moon  on  her  little  mouth. 

Each  of  these  poems  is  an  epigram  and  each  char- 
acterizes a  special  period  of  life,  but  the  antique 
epigram  is  generalized  still-life,  the  modern  is  par- 
ticularized life  in  motion.  Contrast  in  turn  the 
Greek  light-house  speaking,  and  the  fire  in  the 
bowels  of  the  earth.  Says  the  light-house : 

No  longer  dreading  the  rayless  night-mist,  sail  toward  me 
confidently,  O  seafarers;  for  all  wanderers  I  light  my  far- 
shining  torch,  memorial  of  the  labors  of  the  Asclepiadae. 

Mr.  Sandburg  gives  his  conception  this  unity  and 
emphasis: 

KIN 

"  Brother,  I  am  fire 
Surging  under  the  ocean  floor. 
I  shall  never  meet  you,  brother  — 
Not  for  years,  anyhow; 
Maybe  thousands  of  years,  brother. 
Then  I  will  warm  you, 
Hold  you  close,  wrap  you  in  circles, 
Use  you  and  change  you  — 
Maybe  thousands  of  years,  brother." 

The  amazing  difference,  as  it  strikes  me,  is  the 
skill  of  the  modern  in  concentrating  attention.  The 
presenting  of  a  figure,  a  picture,  an  image,  is,  as  quo- 
tation will  show,  a  frequent  consequence  of  the 
imagist  purpose.  But  Mr.  Sandburg  illustrates 
above  all  the  intensity,  the  momentousness,  that  is 

[  307  ] 


gained  by  declining  to  refer  each  object  to  some 
remoter  cause,  by  tending  to  treat  each  object  as  self- 
contained,  purposive  in  its  own  measure,  dynamic. 
"  I  am  the  Great  White  Way  of  the  city."  "  In 
western  fields  of  corn  and  northern  timber  lands, 
they  talk  about  me,  a  saloon  with  a  soul."  "  I  am 
the  crumbier :  to-morrow."  "  They  offer  you  many 
things,  I  a  few."  "  I  am  the  nigger,  Singer  of 
songs."  "  Here  is  a  tall  bold  slugger  set  vivid 
•  against  the  little  soft  cities."  "  I  am  a  copper  wire 
slung  in  the  air."  This  is  not  a  trick.  It  is  simply 
a  pushing  of  the  imagination  to  the  centre  of  the 
will.  And  even  where  there  is  no  such  unity  as  the 
will  provides  another  kind  of  composure  is  secured, 
a  visual  composure.  There  is  none  of  the  laxity 
that  comes  from  splitting  attention  several  ways. 
Consider  these  envisagements  of  a  commonplace 
world : 

FOG 

The  fog  comes 
on  little  cat  feet. 

It  sits  looking 
over  harbor  and  city 
on  silent  haunches 
and  then  moves  on. 

NOCTURNE   IN    A   DESERTED    BRICKYARD 

Stuff  of  the  moon 
Runs  on  the  lapping  sand 
Out  to  the  longest  shadows. 
Under  the  curving  willows, 
And  round  the  creep  of  the  wave  line, 
Fluxions  of  yellow  and  dusk  on  the  waters. 
Make  a  wide  dreaming  pansy  of  an  old  pond  in  the  night. 
[308  ] 


WINDOW 

Night  from  a  railroad  car  window 

Is  a  great,  dark,  soft  thing 

Broken  across  with  slashes  of  light. 

At  first  these  poems  may  appear  too  innocent  of 
self-interpretation  to  mean  anything,  too  impression- 
istic to  compel  the  name  of  beauty  —  to  give  that 
completion  which  has  no  shadow  and  knows  no  end 
beyond  itself.  But  such  exquisite  realization  of  the 
scenes  that  gave  Mr.  Sandburg  the  mood  of  beauty 
is  in  itself  a  creation  of  the  beautiful.  Mr.  Sand- 
burg has  such  art  in  representing  these  scenes  and 
the  actors  in  them  that  doubt  as  to  his  capture  of 
beauty  could  only  occur  to  a  person  filled  with  a 
wrong  expectation.  If  expectation  is  unfulfilled,  in- 
deed, it  can  almost  certainly  be  deemed  wrong,  for 
these  imagist  verses  are  as  good  as  any  of  their  kind. 

But  this  is  not  to  say  that  all  of  Mr.  Sandburg's 
poems  are  inspired.  I  am  not  much  impressed  by 
his  vision  of  Chicago.  This  is  not  because  Chicago 
fails  of  poetry.  In  some  ways  Chicago  is  hideous. 
It  is  noisy  and  harsh  as  a  construction  camp,  chaotic 
as  a  collision,  raw  as  a  wound.  It  is  fringed  by  a 
dirty  rim  of  railroad  track.  It  is  gathered  up  into  a 
centre  for  the  apparent  purpose  of  being  suffocated 
with  an  iron  "  loop."  Even  inside  its  girdle  the 
streets  are  narrow  and  savagely  paved  and  the  alleys 
obscene.  Outside  the  loop  the  city  sprawls  for  miles 
and  miles,  desolate  in  stretches  half-occupied,  con- 
gested in  manufacturing  districts  and  baleful  slums. 
Beneath  a  tarnished  sky  it  fumes  on  its  busy  way, 
bleak  in  winter,  sweltering  in  summer,  without  gra- 
ciousness,  dignity,  pride.  But  for  all  this  ugliness 

[  309  ] 


there  is  something  about  Chicago  not  like  the  im- 
bruted  employer  of  children  and  leech  of  factory 
girls  and  general  blusterer  and  roustabout  that  Mr. 
Sandburg  concocts  for  us.  Mr.  Sandburg  is  quite 
right  that  children  work,  "  broken  and  smothered, 
for  bread  and  wages,"  but  Chicago  is  not  legitimate- 
ly "  haunted  with  shadows  of  hunger-hands."  No 
more  is  it  a  laughing  giant.  It  is  a  work-shop,  but 
largely  a  work-shop  for  business  enterprise,  a  waste- 
ful, inundated,  scrambling,  shoddy,  manufacturing 
city,  a  city  irradiated  to  a  marvelous  degree  by  hope, 
by  faith,  by  charity,  careless,  generous,  inefficient,  as 
well  as  coarse,  husky,  cunning,  strong. 

October  28,  1916. 


[  310  ] 


THE  WAR 


BELGIUM 

IT  is  easier  to  be  wise  about  Belgium  now.  It  is 
easier  to  see  now  that  the  people  of  Belgium  were 
wrong  to  trust  their  safety  to  a  feeble  international 
pledge.  They  were  wrong  to  live  unsuspecting  on 
the  brim  of  an  imperial  volcano.  But  going  back 
to  July,  1914,  and  putting  oneself  in  the  place  of  a 
small  Belgian  professional  man,  a  doctor  or  a  lawyer 
or  a  school-teacher,  putting  oneself  even  in  the  place 
of  M.  Maeterlinck,  it  is  difficult  to  imagine  what  he 
personally  could  have  been  doing  for  security.  The 
Belgian  was  born  without  consultation  into  one  of 
those  small  sovereignties  that  really  exist  on  the  suf- 
ferance of  more  extensively  organized  sovereignties. 
He  was  born  in  literal  mortal  danger  on  this  account. 
But  the  major  part  of  politics  in  most  countries  is 
ordinary  party  politics,  ward  politics.  The  thing 
that  most  occupied  the  Belgian  schoolmaster  was 
probably  the  row  with  the  local  priest  and  the 
flagrant  illiteracy  of  his  district;  that  and  his  interne- 
cine racial  quarrel.  He  had  little  to  do  with  inter- 
national relations  and  their  contingencies.  He  was 
not  thinking  of  Uhlans,  machine  guns,  abdominal 
wounds,  franc-tireurs,  indemnities,  ambulances,  rape, 
mutilation,  soup-kitchens,  flight,  any  more  than  peo- 
ple in  New  London  or  Old  London  were  thinking 
of  them.  He  was  probably  thinking,  in  July,  1914, 

The  Wrack  of  the  Storm,  by  Maurice  Maeterlinck.    Dodd  Mead, 
New  York. 

£313   ] 


of  strawberries,  Charlie  Chaplin  and  picnics.  And 
then,  up  in  Olympia,  the  Old  Guard  of  Germany 
decided  to  let  him  have  it  full  in  the  face. 

Waiving  for  a  moment  the  unwarrantable  weak- 
ness of  Belgium,  which  Belgium  did  not  realize,  the 
temper  of  the  German  invasion  has  to  be  imagined. 
It  was  not  malignant.  It  was,  to  start  with,  merely 
roughshod.  When  the  Germans  were  mobilized  in 
their  gray-green  myriads,  so  formidable,  so  efficient, 
they  undoubtedly  had  a  collective  fear  of  Russia  and 
her  ally  France  and  a  collective  sense  of  an  inimical 
England.  As  they  marched  to  their  mobilization 
trains,  roses  in  their  rifle-barrels,  women  by  their 
side,  they  were  thinking  grimly  of  Russian  and 
French  mobilization.  They  had  less  than  nothing 
against  Belgium.  But  once  the  ruler  of  Germany 
and  his  agents  had  ordered  the  invasion  of  Belgium 
there  was  nothing  for  the  German  army  to  do  but 
invade  Belgium.  So  the  German  schoolmaster  and 
doctor  and  lawyer  went  forward,  quite  aware  that 
the  maneuvre  contemplated  for  many  years  was  about 
to  be  carried  out,  but  not  at  all  translating  that 
maneuvre,  or  wishing  to  translate  it,  into  terms  of 
Belgian  misfortune. 

There  is  something  so  hideous  about  such  an  im- 
position of  force  that  one  seeks  to  blame  it  on  the 
man  higher  up.  One  seeks  to  agree  with  pro-Ger- 
mans of  one's  acquaintance  that  Belgium  was  in- 
evitably chosen  in  the  line  of  callous  military  neces- 
sity. These  "  inevitables  "  are,  however,  too  easy. 
It  is  quite  appropriate  for  M.  Maeterlinck  to  say 
toward  the  end  of  his  book:  "  If  our  enemies  prove 
that  they  were  deceived  and  corrupted  by  their  mas- 
ters, they  prove,  at  the  same  time,  that  they  are  less 


intelligent,  less  firmly  attached  to  justice,  honor  and 
humanity,  less  civilized,  in  a  word,  than  those  whom 
they  claimed  the  right  to  enslave  in  the  name  of  a 
superiority  which  they  themselves  have  proved  not 
to  exist;  and,  unless  they  can  establish  that  their 
errors,  perfidies  and  cruelties,  which  can  no  longer 
be  denied,  should  be  imputed  only  to  those  masters, 
then  they  themselves  must  bear  the  pitiless  weight." 
This  is  profoundly  true.  If  it  could  be  inevitable 
that  the  German  people  had  to  join  an  army  that 
in  turn  was  obliged  to  invade  Belgium,  what  sort  of 
.people  can  they  be  deemed? 

Much  is  possible,  of  course,  in  a  great  nation 
where  the  people  defer  to  the  high  control  of  their 
rulers  and  military  chiefs  and  have  little  to  say  as 
to  their  journalists,  their  clerics,  their  educators.  In 
such  a  nation  public  opinion  is  so  nurtured  that  it  is 
hard  to  imagine  the  people's  temper  and  will.  It  is 
mere  sentimentalism,  however,  to  assume  that  the 
German  public  made  no  assents  to  war.  It  is,  in 
fact,  inconceivable  that  the  European  war  could  have 
been  launched  even  by  rulers  with  their  hands  on  the 
lever  of  universal  military  service  unless  there  was 
a  state  of  mind  receptive  to  it  in  Germany.  That 
receptiveness  was  not  all  due  to  the  will  to  war.  It 
was  not  all  due  to  premeditation.  There  was  much 
warranted  righteousness  in  Germany's  attitude  to- 
ward Russia  and  England.  She  had  more  than  once 
seen  their  maps  of  diplomacy  on  which  the  mountains 
bristled  like  bayonets  and  the  rivers  gleamed  like 
swords.  But  these  maps  bristled  and  gleamed  all 
the  more  intensely  because  there  was  in  the  German 
patriotic  heart  the  self-assurance,  the  animosity,  the 
deeply  inculcated  nationalism,  the  narrow  interpreta- 

[  3i5  ] 


tion  of  foreign  relations,  the  reciprocation  to  war, 
for  which  any  Zabernist  might  hope.  It  is  incon- 
clusive to  assert  that  individual  Germans  did  not 
realize  or  proclaim  these  things.  One  must  judge 
by  massed  Germans.  A  glass  of  water  looks  color- 
less, the  sea  is  green. 

The  guilt  of  the  invasion  of  Belgium  lies  deep  on 
the  German  people.  How  deep  the  guilt  is,  books 
like  M.  Maeterlinck's  make  known.  It  is  a  curious 
thing  that  German  public  opinion  did  not  so  reject 
in  advance  the  infamy  of  invading  Belgium  as  to 
keep  the  general  staff  from  incurring  it.  The  day 
had  passed  when  a  national  misunderstanding  with 
France  could  be  availed  of,  even  by  a  calculated  lie 
similar  to  Bismarck's,  but  Russia  and  England  re- 
mained as  enemies  whom  the  world  might  conceiv- 
ably have  come  to  side  against.  On  the  day  of  mo- 
bilization millions  of  fair  German  heads  must  have 
been  lifted  proudly  at  the  thought  of  engaging  a 
blunderingly  brutal  power  like  Russia,  of  laying  low 
a  rival  craftily  respectable  like  England.  But  such 
brave  pride  loses  its  glamour  when  one  thinks  of  a 
squalidly  hideous  entrance  into  European  warfare 
by  a  half-protected  back-door.  It  is  the  dirtiest  act 
of  a  dirty  predatory  tradition  common  to  England, 
Russia,  France,  Italy,  Belgium,  as  well  as  Germany 
itself. 

For  many  years  M.  Maeterlinck  lived  apart  from 
Belgium.  He  spent  his  time  in  France,  an  artist  in 
sensibility,  in  pensive  and  decorative  sadnesses,  gen- 
tle metaphysic.  The  Belgium  of  those  days  was  not 
the  obvious  dependent  of  to-day.  It  had,  indeed,  no 
genuine  security.  It  held  nothing  but  a  valueless 
note  at  sight  on  a  supposititious  international  con- 


science,  but  it  was  apparently  a  successful  prosperous 
semi-industrial  land,  the  Belgium  of  Leopold  and  the 
Congo.  The  Congo!  When  Germany  began  to 
treat  the  poor  Belgians  as  if  they  were  as  little 
human  as  the  Congoese,  M.  Maeterlinck's  imagina- 
tion inflamed.  He  became,  by  virtue  of  his  literary 
reputation,  the  voice  of  his  nation's  tragedy.  He 
went  to  Milan  in  November,  1914,  and  to  Rome 
in  March,  1915,  to  appeal  to  Italy;  and  in  London 
in  July,  1915,  he  addressed  an  audience  of  sympa- 
thizers at  the  Queen's  Hall.  These  addresses,  to- 
gether with  all  the  essays  he  published  in  any  way 
relating  to  the  war,  and  a  sketch  written  in  1886 
called  The  Massacre  of  the  Innocents,  are  collected 
in  this  volume.  And  in  its  pages  there  is  the  echo 
of  horror,  anguish,  despair,  hatred.  He  is,  in  truth, 
the  spokesman  of  a  ruined  country,  a  country  which 
it  is  beyond  the  power  of  man  to  compensate  or 
restore.  A  new  Belgium,  indeed,  will  succeed  to 
the  Belgium  known  to  M.  Maeterlinck  and  ourselves. 
The  earth  will  fructify  again.  But  the  Belgium  of 
which  he  now  writes  as  a  patriot  has  been  destroyed 
in  spirit  and  in  flesh. 

Nothing  the  Germans  required  for  their  develop- 
ment can  be  held  to  justify  this  sacrifice,  and  no 
philosophy  but  the  basest  predatory  philosophy  can 
excuse  them.  Belgium  remains,  and  ought  to  re- 
main, the  inescapable  accusatory  witness  in  the  pres- 
ent war.  Belgium  is  not  a  witness  to  the  virtue  of 
France  or  Russia.  It  is  only  slightly  a  witness  to 
the  enlistment  of  England  in  the  war.  But  it  is 
definitely,  helplessly,  immovably,  a  proof  that  the 
German  military  authorities  could  count  on  the  Ger- 
man people,  could  formulate  a  filthy  code  and  secure 

[  3i7  ] 


its  application,  could  disregard  world-wide  presump- 
tions as  to  honor  and  responsibility.  When  all  this 
is  said,  however,  even  with  the  eloquence  and  lofti- 
ness of  M.  Maeterlinck,  there  is  no  wisdom  in  it  but 
the  wisdom  of  recrimination  and  punishment.  It 
ties  dead  Belgium  around  the  neck  of  living  Belgium. 
It  declares  for  remorseless  vengeance.  "  In  reject- 
ing hatred  I  shall  have  shown  myself  a  traitor  to 
love." 

Hatred  is  as  fruitless  as  love  to  restore  the  Bel- 
gium that  the  Germans  destroyed.  The  German 
people  should  not  escape  the  practical  consequence 
of  taking  to  the  sword.  They  should  not  emerge 
from  the  war  in  shining  armor.  They  should  emerge 
after  conclusive  defeat.  But  this  defeat,  which  is 
now  probable,  should  not  be  greeted  exultantly  by 
the  friends  of  Belgium,  any  more  than  the  friends 
of  the  Congo  should  rejoice  to  have  seen  Belgium 
seared.  M.  Maeterlinck  sees  Germany  as  intrin- 
sically base.  He  sanctifies  the  duty  of  punishment. 
He  demands  an  eye  for  an  eye.  It  is  the  spiritual 
blindness  of  all  men  agonized.  If  the  prostration, 
of  Germany  could  secure  international  peace  there 
might  be  some  purpose  in  M.  Maeterlinck's  tenor. 
No  such  purpose  really  exists.  In  dealing  with  crim- 
inals there  is  no  value  in  the  doctrine,  an  eye  for  an 
eye.  As  M.  Maeterlinck  indicts  the  Germans  they 
are  criminals,  but  something  beside  hatred  must  be 
brought  to  the  case. 

The  whole  world  is  involved  in  the  case  of  Bel- 
gium. M.  Maeterlinck  would  have  had  the  whole 
world  join  in  punishing  Germany,  and  that  is  under- 
standable. But  quite  as  important  as  the  lesson 
from  reprisal  is  the  establishment  of  Belgium  and 


states  like  Belgium  on  a  basis  that  makes  violation 
a  breach  of  organized  union  rather  than  a  breach  of 
treaty  diplomatically  private,  suspicious,  insincere. 
The  best  way  to  hate  the  Germans  that  ruined  Bel- 
gium is  to  hate  the  nationalistic  anarchy  that  made 
the  invasion  of  Belgium  an  irresistible  short-cut  in 
the  game. 

It  is  perhaps  this  issue,  not  clear  in  M.  Maeter- 
linck's volume,  that  begins  to  develop  for  the  re- 
flective mind.  Not  the  kind  of  mind  represented  by 
timid  neutrality,  nor  yet  the  kind  of  mind  represented 
by  a  solicitude  for  the  German  vote.  Belgium  was 
not  once  mentioned  at  the  Republican  National  Con- 
vention, and  it  seems  to  have  sunk  out  of  American 
electioneering  consciousness.  It  remains,  however, 
the  symbol  of  the  detestable  international  system 
which  gave  birth  to  the  European  war.  Those  who 
question  that  system  will  be  sympathetic  to  M.  Mae- 
terlinck but  not  satisfied  by  him. 

October  14,  1916. 


[  319  3! 


PATRONIZING  THE  WAR 

MAX  EASTMAN  does  not  pretend  to  reach  his 
"  understanding  "  of  Germany  through  any  prefer- 
ence for  things  German.  His  understanding  is  the 
outcome  of  his  general  mode  of  thinking  and  merely 
part  of  his  theory  for  the  war.  If  an  ordinary  par- 
tisan spoke  of  "  understanding  Germany  "  it  would 
mean  only  one  thing,  it  would  mean  he  excused  and 
favored  Germany.  In  Max  Eastman's  case  it  means 
that  he  declines  to  see  Germany  as  the  agent  of 
trouble  in  an  international  system  otherwise  prac- 
ticable. It  means  that  he  sees  Germany  quite  clear- 
ly as  the  first  European  "  part "  that  buckled  in  a 
system  that  was  bound  to  end  in  trouble ;  and  there- 
fore, regarding  the  system  as  questionable,  he  feels 
it  idle  to  blame  the  faulty  German  part  in  particular. 
The  thing  to  do  is  not  to  recriminate.  What  is  the 
use  of  getting  angry  with  a  defective  mechanism? 
The  subject  is  to  be  approached  in  the  manner  of 
the  psychologist,  the  diagnostician.  The  only  pos- 
sible service  is  to  prescribe  against  its  recurrence. 

In  no  place  does  Max  Eastman  use  any  such  trite 
mechanistic  phrase  as  "  system,"  but  that  remains  the 
interpretation  one  has  to  put  on  Understanding  Ger- 
many. It  is  not  merely  that  he  pleads  that  the  Ger- 
mans are  human.  He  implies  that  their  behavior 
his  been  inevitable.  You  are  indignant  about  Bel- 
Understanding  Germany,  by  Max  Eastman.  Kennerley,  New 
York. 

[   320  ] 


gium?  he  asks.  You  ought  to  be  indignant  about 
"  the  causes  of  war."  You  resent  the  raw  and  brutal 
frankness  as  to  the  violation  of  Belgium.  How 
about  the  refined  and  tactful  casuistry  as  to  the  vio- 
lation of  Greece?  You  are  inflamed  over  the  atroci- 
ties. How  about  the  "  atrocities  committed  by  Eng- 
lish, French,  Russian,  Serbian  soldiers?  "  You  hate 
"  German  "  militarism.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
German  militarism.  The  Germans  are  not  a  dif- 
ferent kind  of  people  from  the  English.  They  are 
the  same  kind  of  people  placed  in  different  circum- 
stances. F.  S.  Oliver  and  Lord  Roberts  talked 
"  militarism  "  just  as  the  Germans  did.  So  does 
General  O'Ryan  in  New  York.  If  you  hate  militar- 
ism, "  do  not  delude  yourself  into  imagining  it  is 
Germany  that  you  hate.  It  is  yourselves  as  you  will 
become,  if  the  dreams  of  your  munition-makers  and 
gold-braid  patriots  are  realized." 

There  is,  of  course,  a  purpose  in  this  mode  of 
thinking  about  the  war,  ?his  mechanistic  talk  about 
the  same  people  in  different  circumstances.  It  is 
revealed  with  Max  Eastman's  suggestion  of  a  super- 
society,  of  patriotism  and  the  way  to  manage  it,  of 
supra-nationalism  and  the  way  to  end  war.  Like  so 
many  men  whose  temperateness  seems  almost  a  cause 
for  reproach,  who  appear  unconcerned  in  the  face 
of  struggle  and  agony,  Max  Eastman  discloses  him- 
self as  outside  partisanship  not  because  he  is  in- 
human but  because  he  sees  no  hope  for  humanity  in 
making  militancy  the  helmsman,  sees  hope  for  it  only 
in  directing  that  pugnacious  energy  inherent  in  man- 
kind against  mindless  opponents  incorrigibly  un- 
friendly and  lawless.  He  believes  that  an  insep- 
arable condition  of  the  present  war  is  nationalisnij 


that  if  people  thought  and  felt  supra-nationally,  wars 
like  the  present  one  could  not  happen.  Patriotism 
is  egoism,  we  ought  to  hate  it  as  a  cause  of  war. 
Like  other  egoism,  it  is  incurable.  It  inheres  in 
human  nature  and  comes  out  in  the  pseudo-organism 
of  the  nation.  But  it  can  be  attached  to  a  new  unit, 
and  we  can  alter  the  environment  so  as  to  remove 
the  "  occasions  "  of  international  war.  "  Offer  that 
instinct  of  self-identification  a  larger  group  to  which 
it  may  cling."  You  cannot  root  out  patriotism  but 
you  ought  to  fix  the  "  habit  of  loyalty  "  to  a  league, 
a  union,  a  greater  state.  That  state,  drawn  out  of 
the  disorder  of  nations  to-day  as  the  smaller  state 
was  drawn  out  of  tribes  and  clans,  is  as  yet  only  a 
promise  and  a  hope.  In  spite  of  that,  the  abolition 
of  war,  the  federation  of  the  world,  is  "  a  matter  of 
Christianity  and  good  business."  The  wiser  inter- 
nationalist capitalists  see  it  as  such.  And  when  they 
abolish  war,  with  the  aid  of  the  socialist,  "  we  can 
the  more  assiduously  attend  to  our  gentle  crime  of 
abolishing  capitalism." 

This  is  not  inhuman.  Compared  with  the  intem- 
perateness  about  Germany  among  the  leisure  class 
in  America,  it  is  the  acme  of  humanity.  It  is,  never- 
theless, extraordinarily  smug  and  condescending  and 
bland.  What  one  seeks  in  Max  Eastman  is  not  par- 
tisanship with  either  set  of  belligerents,  much  less  an 
advocacy  of  fighting.  Every  one  deplores  the  waste- 
fulness of  pugnacity.  But  one  does  seek  an  imagina- 
tive realization  of  the  national  beings  and  the  human 
beings  involved.  The  war  is  a  hellish  thing  to  have 
happen  in  Europe,  a  mad  thing,  a  culpable,  an  atro- 
cious. No  one  knows  what  will  be  the  outcome  for 
future  international  relations,  so  savage  are  the  pas- 

[  322  ] 


sions  now  seething.  But  the  situation  having  arisen, 
whatever  the  selfish  and  sinister  causes,  it  cannot  be 
imaginatively  conceived  by  an  internationalist  as  if 
it  were  happening  on  Jupiter. 

Max  Eastman  takes  the  attitude  that  the  war  is 
a  sort  of  delirium  tremens,  a  debauch,  and  "  uninter- 
esting." If  man  were  born  for  socialism  alone,  to 
behave  according  to  the  presumptions  of  the  social- 
ists, that  might  be  a  pardonable  way  of  taking  the 
war.  But  however  egregious  the  war  may  seem 
from  the  standpoint  of  systematization,  it  is  not 
egregious  so  far  as  Frenchmen  and  Germans  and 
Russians  and  Belgians  and  Austrians  and  Turks  and 
Englishmen  and  seven  other  combatant  governments 
are  concerned.  And  as  this  fight  is  fought,  self-iden- 
tifications for  the  future  will  be  decided.  By  the  ce- 
ment of  blood  men  will  establish  many  new  political 
arrangements.  To  stand  aside,  therefore,  and  pat- 
ronize the  war,  talk  of  it  smoothly  and  smugly,  is 
about  as  insufferable  as  it  is  for  the  ruling  class  to 
patronize  poverty.  If  a  man  has  any  pretensions  to 
public  spirit  he  has  not  only  to  theorize  for  society. 
He  has  to  take  the  public  as  it  finds  itself,  not  as  he 
would  prefer  to  have  it.  He  cannot  refuse  to  deal 
with  it  unless  it  behaves  like  a  Little  Lord  Fauntle- 
roy.  It  is  a  pose,  of  course,  to  say  the  war  is  unin- 
teresting, but  underneath  the  pose  there  is  a  sincere 
impatience  with  actuality,  a  contempt  of  facts  for 
falling  out  as  they  do.  To  be  in  love  with  love  is 
the  sophomore's  characteristic,  to  fail  of  love  the 
moment  the  human  object  falls  below  one's  expecta- 
tion. Something  of  the  same  trait  is  exhibited  in 
Max  Eastman's  relations  to  society.  Because  the 
is  distasteful  he  regards  it  as  inconsequential. 
[  323  1 


He  discusses  it  without  genuine  appreciation  of  its 
immediate  throbbing  problem  and  pain. 

It  comes,  I  suppose,  from  the  excessive  simplifi- 
cations to  which  Max  Eastman  is  prone.     Knowing, 
as  his  note  on  Nietzsche  shows,  that  it  is  silly  to  be 
too  simple  about  egoism  in  human  beings,  he  himself 
underestimates  the  difficulty  of  adjustment  between 
national  beings,  though  the  Civil  War  in  this  coun- 
try is  such  a  terrific  commentary  on  the  prescription 
of  a  new  "  habit  of  loyalty."     There  is  no  system 
that  can  ensure  the  perfect  relations  of  personalities, 
and  nations  are  personalities  as  well  as  mechanisms, 
with  "  causes  of  war  "  on  every  side.     To  distribute 
the  blame  equally  in  the  present  instance,   on  the 
ground  that  both  sides  are  human,  is  also  too  dam- 
nably simple.     Germany  is  not  a  figment,  neither  is 
Russia,  neither  is  England.     Once  before  Germany 
had  her  individual  will  of  Frenchmen,  to  the  point 
of  taxing  them,  and  very  nearly  succeeded  this  sec- 
ond time.     Such  things  are  consequential  for  gen- 
erations.    They  are,  if  you  like,  unpleasant  —  un- 
pleasant as  smallpox  in  the  next  street.     But  they 
aren't  uninteresting.     Only  a  pathologist  who  saw 
human  beings  exclusively  as  guinea  pigs  and  had  be- 
come bored  with  smallpox  could  afford  to  take  that 
view.  ,  The  pathologist,  one  may  retort,  appears  in- 
human merely  because,   like  Max  Eastman,   he  is 
curative  by  the  wholesale   rather  than  the   retail. 
But  there  are  symptoms  in  Max  Eastman  of  the 
intellectualist  who  thinks  that  man   exists   for  his 
theory  rather  than  the  theory  for  man. 

Such  intellectualism  can  be  given  an  illustration. 
Only  a  while  ago  it  was  the  fashion  of  socialists  to 

[324] 


pooh-pooh  patriotism.  It  did  not  fit  in  with  the 
theory  of  the  international  solidarity  of  labor,  and 
for  that  reason  it  was  conveniently  said  and  felt  to 
be  negligible.  That  fashion  has  passed.  It  is  in. 
line  with  a  new  maneuvre  that  Max  Eastman  should 
take  patriotism  with  the  seriousness  already  indi- 
cated. Patriotism  is  now  one  of  the  unalterable 
facts  of  human  nature.  The  motive  of  patriotic 
fighting  is  now  a  native  impulse  of  our  constitutions. 
The  backbone  of  the  sentiment  of  patriotism  is  hered- 
itary. Patriotism  is  incurable.  It  "  is  a  fighting 
self-identification  with  the  gang,  the  tribe,  the  nation. 
It  is  there  in  our  human  hearts  forever."  And  so 
on.  ''  This  fact  has  been  ignored  by  those  immersed 
in  the  economic  interpretation,  because  the  instinctive 
nature  of  man  was  not  discovered  until  after  eco- 
nomics got  well  under  way.  But  we  might  as  well 
acknowledge  it  now." 

Having  authorized  the  "  instinctive  nature  of 
man,"  Max  Eastman  explains  the  war  with  all  too 
little  trouble  ("I  have  brought  to  the  task  the  equip- 
ment of  a  psychologist  ") . 

The  causes  of  war  are  innumerable,  but  the  underlying 
condition  without  which,  no  matter  what  causes  arose,  wars 
could  neither  begin  nor  continue,  is  that  egregious  fighting 
identification  of  self  with  a  nation  which  is  neither  German 
nor  English  (nor  even  Irish)  but  a  general  human  attribute. 
This  is  the  thing  we  ought  to  be  hating ;  instead  we  are  cul- 
tivating it  in  ourselves  by  hating  another  nation. 

If  one  had  refused  to  defer  to  the  "  solidarity  of 
labor,"  when  it  was  in  fashion,  why  should  one  now 
defer  to  this  new  psychological  interpretation,  equally 

[  325  ] 


complete  and  equally  bland?  The  "  causes  of  war," 
in  point  of  fact,  are  no  easy  matter  to  diagnose.  The 
sublimation  of  nationalism  may  meet  some  of  the 
causes,  difficult  as  that  sublimation  will  be  to  accom- 
plish. But  the  problem  is  not  simple,  when  one  race 
can  quite  frankly  profit  by  exterminating  another,  as 
the  white  race  profited  by  exterminating  the  red,  and 
when  one  government  can  quite  frankly  plot  to  betray 
another  into  war,  as  Bismarck's  Germany  plotted  to 
"  do  up  "  France.  These  things  do  not  fit  into  for- 
mulas. They  ought  not  to  be  glibly  explained. 

There  is  this,  however,  to  be  said  in  favor  of  Max 
Eastman's  Understanding  Germany;  an  extreme  ra- 
tionalism about  Germany  is  serviceable  in  an  Amer- 
ica that  is  filled  with  empty  cant  about  the  war. 

There  is  a  kind  of  human  being  who  anatomically 
resembles  a  sausage,  all  meat  and  very  thin  as  to  the 
skin.  That  is  the  kind  of  human  being  who  most 
of  all  wants  the  Japanese  hustled  to  the  trenches 
and  the  United  States  to  declare  war  on  Hoboken, 
who  is  willing  to  have  the  war  last  forever  so  that 
he  can  retain  his  peace  of  body.  He  sits  in  gloom 
because  Germany  is  not  yet  beaten.  Germany  af- 
flicts him  as  something  indigestible  might  afflict  him, 
something  that  upsets  the  place  where  he  really  lives. 

When  you  consider  that  the  world  is  full  of  such 
people  as  this,  the  German  and  the  English  world  as 
well  as  the  American,  you  hesitate  to  criticize  any- 
one who  has  the  clean,  amazing  temperateness  of 
Max  Eastman.  You  realize  that  such  antiseptic 
thinking  as  Max  Eastman's  has  fineness  and  rare- 
ness, that  it  is  beyond  the  capacity  of  most  people 
even  to  initiate,  and  beyond  all  but  a  very  few  to 
sustain.  The  world  in  which  Max  Eastman  lives  is 

[  326  ] 


so  different  from  the  blind  forest  of  grunting  and 
rooting  vitalities  that  the  mere  reminder  of  it  is  a 
final  criticism  of  lives  which  proceed  without  vision. 
You  have  to  dissociate  your  own  criticism  of  Max 
Eastman  from  those  criticisms  that  would  be  the  re- 
sult of  enragement.  Once  you  do  it,  however,  you 
may  say  that  his  vision  of  the  war  is,  like  most 
visions,  open  to  certain  objections.  To  put  those 
objections  intelligently  is  not  easy.  It  is  not  easy 
to  discriminate  against  any  man  who  aims  at  detach- 
ment without  feeding  the  base  prejudices  that  pick 
up  every  partisan  word.  But  there  are  too  few  Max 
Eastmans  in  the  United  States  to  have  his  vision  of 
the  war  presented  without  venturing  one's  estimate 
of  it,  whatever  the  risk  of  pleasing  the  obtuse. 

January  13,  1917* 


I  327  ] 


BEYOND  PATRIOTISM 

AMERICANS  have  known  for  some  time  that  the 
English  philosopher  Bertrand  Russell  came  into  con- 
flict with  his  government  because  of  his  lectures  and 
has  been  repudiated  by  his  university  and  restricted 
in  his  civil  liberties.  What  this  has  meant  not  many 
Americans  have  inquired.  Some  have  said:  Eng- 
land is  at  war.  Bertrand  Russell  is  in  conflict  with 
the  authorities.  The  authorities  may  not  know 
much  about  philosophy,  but  they  probably  know  what 
is  best.  If  they  don't,  it  is  too  bad,  but  Bertrand 
Russell  must  put  up  with  it.  You  can't  expect  such 
luxuries  as  "  freedom  of  speech  "  in  time  of  war. 

The  most  famous  of  stories  deals  with  a  lofty  im- 
perial judge  who  exhibited  the  inadequacy  of  the  law. 
The  inadequacy  of  the  law  is  a  twice-told  tale.  But 
no  one,  not  the  clerks  of  sacred  legend  or  the  mas- 
ters of  corrective  comedy,  not  Rabelais  or  Swift  or 
Voltaire  or  Heine  or  Ibsen  or  Shaw  or  Anatole 
France,  has  ever  done  complete  justice  to  the  gift 
of  humanity  for  misunderstanding,  to  the  irony  of 
smallness  in  power.  Authority  insists  on  reverence. 
Authority  in  the  person  of  some  frantic  abortioner 
asks  for  universal  humble  acquiescence  as  he  pro- 
ceeds to  his  act  of  abortion.  This  is  the  bitter  ex- 
travaganza to  which  generation  after  generation  has 
been  invited,  for  which  docility  is  inculcated  and  eti- 
quette arranged.  As  if  authority  had  never  robed 

Why  Men  Fight,  by  Bertrand  Russell.     Century  Co.,  New  York. 
[328] 


itself  to  embody  hate  and  fear,  men  who  would  never 
stoop  to  infamy  themselves  readily  align  themselves 
with  legalized  infamy.  And  they  do  not  even  sus- 
pect their  own  dishonor. 

It  is  a  good  deal  to  ask  of  anyone  in  wartime,  even 
of  an  American  who  is  three  thousand  miles  from 
the  slaughter,  to  employ  his  sense  of  justice.  But 
the  sense  of  humor,  if  not  the  sense  of  justice,  is 
absolutely  required  in  Bertrand  Russell's  case.  Here 
is  a  human  being  who  has  brought  to  the  considera- 
tion of  the  war  an  intellect  of  extraordinary  scrupu- 
lousness, an  imagination  penetrated  with  conscious- 
ness of  human  values,  a  broad  and  serious  sense  of 
responsibility,  a  complete  emancipation  from  per- 
sonal motives  and  a  complete  independence  of  class 
and  party  and  creed.  He  is  not  a  person  of  any 
dubious  ethnic  origin.  He  is  not  an  unstable  Celt 
or  materialist  Jew  or  lamentable  Hindu.  If  a  man's 
pedigree  as  an  Englishman  had  to  be  tattooed  on 
him,  Bertrand  Russell's  could  have  been  tattooed 
from  memory  by  any  one  of  a  hundred  country-house 
beldames.  He  is  as  English  as  cricket.  He  did 
not  care  foj  his  country,  it  is  true,  the  way  Lord 
Northcliffe  cares  for  it,  the  way  William  Randolph 
Hearst  cares  for  this  country.  Nor  did  he  propose 
to  give  free  rein  to  his  beloved  country,  leaving  it 
to  its  dear  devices,  the  way  New  Englanders  gave 
free  rein  to  their  indulged  New  York,  New  Haven 
and  Hartford.  Bertrand  Russell  loved  his  country 
but  not  as  if  it  were  a  Joss,  a  thing  of  profit,  or  a 
slut.  He  did  not  accept  the  same  relation  to  it  that 
inquisitors  once  accepted  to  their  religion,  that  moun- 
taineers do  to  their  moonshining,  that  peasants  do 
to  their  Black  Hand.  In  the  hour  when  many  sim- 

[  329  ] 


pier  men  flung  themselves  under  the  Juggernaut  of 
patriotism,  Bertrand  Russell  felt  true  patriotism  to 
be  the  control,  the  guidance,  the  sublimation  of  that 
tremendous  sacrificial  impulse.  He  saw  his  country- 
men go  to  war  and  he  knew  it  was  for  their  common 
country.  That  he  could  not  prevent.  But  the  con- 
sequences of  their  blind  heroic  impulse,  its  bearing 
on  the  world  in  which  his  country  would  have  to  con- 
tinue to  function,  he  was  bound  by  every  law  of  his 
nature  to  estimate,  for  very  love  of  England  if  for 
nothing  else. 

It  is  possible  that  all  the  lectures  to  which  the 
British  government  took  exception  are  not  contained 
in  Why  Men  Fight.  Considering  the  nature  of  those 
that  are  included,  however,  and  the  quality  of  man 
they  exemplify,  the  official  misunderstanding  is  estab- 
lished. It  is  easy  to  see  what  a  wartime  government, 
any  wartime  government,  requires.  It  requires  its 
philosophers  to  fall  in  with  the  tribe,  to  bellow  when 
the  ringleader  bellows,  to  shout  "  atrocity  "  or  "  bar- 
barian "  or  "  democracy  "  in  chorus,  to  wear  war- 
paint and  dance  around  the  ring.  It  is  not  merely 
the  Haeckels  and  the  Euckens  of  whom  this  is  ex- 
pected, it  is  expected  of  French  and  of  English  philos- 
ophers in  a  similar  spirit.  And  if,  to  the  honor  of 
England,  a  philosopher  refuses  to  abandon  the  reali- 
ties that  he  deems  ultimate  not  only  for  himself  but 
for  his  nation,  there  is  a  howl  of  anger  from  the 
mob,  subservient  clamor  from  every  perjured  intel- 
lectual, a  decree  by  government  that  gives  to  silly 
prejudice  the  intonation  of  high  loyalty,  the  intona- 
tion of  the  voice  of  God. 

Those  who  are  out  of  the  melee  may  sympathize 
with  the  trials  of  officialdom.  The  crisis  is  harrow- 

[  330] 


ing.  About  the  merits  of  Bertrand  Russell's  atti- 
tude, however,  it  would  be  final  delinquency  to  close 
one's  mind.  It  matters  a  good  deal  that  the  British 
government  should  not  be  unnecessarily  hampered 
during  the  conduct  of  a  merciless  war.  But  every- 
thing depends  upon  what  one  means  by  "  hampered." 
There  are  Germans  who  demand  that  in  the  conduct 
of  a  merciless  war  they  should  not  be  hampered  by 
neutrals,  should  not  be  hampered  by  any  sort  of  cri- 
terion normally  deemed  "  human."  When,  on  this 
frantically  patriotic  principle,  the  Germans  sank  the 
Lusitania,  few  disinterested  people  agreed  with  them. 
Yet  when  another  kind  of  logicality  is  resisted  by 
Bertrand  Russell,  the  logicality  of  blind  submission 
to  the  state,  of  reciprocal  animosity,  of  national  ego- 
ism, of  war-fever  and  destructiveness  and  cynicism, 
he  is  confronted  by  the  argument  that  he  is  "  ham- 
pering "  his  country,  and  he  is  muzzled  like  a  dog. 
And  just  because  certain  Americans  want  England 
to  win,  at  any  cost,  this  intellectual  von  Tirpitzism 
does  not  shock  them.  They  have  arrived  at  the 
stage  where  any  fool  who  cries  "  victory  "  or  "  patri- 
otism "  or  "  loyalty  "  seems  wiser  than  the  sage  who 
cannot  take  such  slag  as  his  nation's  spiritual  fuel. 

To  read  Why  Men  Fight  with  any  sympathy  is  to 
be  entranced  by  the  honesty,  the  concentration,  the 
intelligence,  the  equilibrium  of  its  author.  He  is 
the  kind  of  man,  I  have  no  doubt,  in  whom  the  war 
disclosed  to  himself  a  whole  set  of  false  presump- 
tions about  the  nature  of  human  character  and  the 
possibilities  of  reasonableness  and  the  chance  of 
avoidance  of  conflict  and  giving  pain.  "  It  would 
be  better  a  hundredfold,"  he  was  driven  to  exclaim 
even  recently,  "  to  forego  material  comfort,  power, 

[  33i  ] 


pomp,  and  outward  glory  than  to  kill  and  be  killed, 
to  hate  and  be  hated,  to  throw  away  in  a  mad  mo- 
ment of  fury  the  bright  heritage  of  ages."  That  is 
a  bias  of  his  nature  which  it  would  be  dishonest  not 
to  recognize.  But  it  is  not  a  bias  that  decides  the 
character  of  his  thinking.  That  thinking  has  made 
a  place  for  everything  the  war  has  had  to  offer  him. 
It  has  made  a  place  for  the  obvious  aggressiveness 
of  Germany,  for  the  reasonableness  of  preparing  to 
meet  that  aggressiveness,  for  the  exaltation  of  pa- 
triotism, for  the  impossibility  of  passive  pacificism. 
Everything  spiritual  in  him  may  have  been  crucified 
by  the  war.  One  supposes  this  to  be  the  case  by 
reason  of  the  tensions  of  his  thinking.  But  he  has 
had  such  vigor  and  health  of  mind  that  he  could 
meet  this  terrific  spiritual  crisis  without  quailing, 
without  shirking,  without  recanting.  If  one  were 
looking  for  a  truth-lover  in  the  present  crisis,  in- 
deed, one  could  find  few  as  great  as  Bertrand  Rus- 
sell. "  Men  fear  thought,"  he  says  in  his  chapter 
on  education,  "  as  they  fear  nothing  else  on  earth  — 
more  than  ruin,  more  even  than  death.  Thought 
is  subversive  and  revolutionary,  destructive  and  ter- 
rible; thought  is  merciless  to  privilege,  established 
institutions,  and  comfortable  habits;  thought  is 
anarchic  and  lawless,  indifferent  to  authority,  care- 
less of  the  well  tried  wisdom  of  the  ages.  Thought 
looks  into  the  pit  of  hell  and  is  not  afraid.  It  sees 
man,  a  feeble  speck,  surrounded  by  unfathomable 
depths  of  silence;  yet  it  bears  itself  proudly,  as  un- 
moved as  if  it  were  lord  of  the  universe.  Thought 
is  great  and  swift  and  free,  the  light  of  the  world, 
and  the  chief  glory  of  man."  One  imagines  that 
this  paean  burst  from  him  after  his  own  experience 

[  332  ] 


in  the  pit  of  hell,  after  he  fought  through  to  some 
understanding  of  the  war. 

In  order  to  understand  the  war  Bertrand  Russell 
had  to  overhaul  his  universe.  He  might  have  chosen 
between  his  country  and  Germany,  and  called  that 
"  understanding  "  the  war.  He  might  have  taken 
a  Henry  Ford  view,  child-like  pity  for  the  "  boys  " 
in  the  trenches.  He  might  have  attempted  realistic 
politics.  He  might  have  remained  a  sheer  pacifist, 
blaming  a  mysterious  "  system  "  and  standing  aside. 
Any  one  of  a  hundred  schemes  of  explanation  might 
have  sustained  him,  but  all  his  life  he  had  gone  back 
of  the  ostensible,  gone  into  the  hinterland  of  human 
nature,  to  see  if  something  that  did  not  ask  him  to 
shut  off  candor  and  speculation  could  be  summoned 
for  his  guidance  about  life.  And  by  examining  the 
springs  of  men's  preferences  during  this  struggle, 
the  sources  of  action,  the  bases  of  behavior,  he  picked 
up  clue  after  clue  to  the  passions  that  were  wheeling 
around  him  and  spinning  his  senses  with  every  turn. 
He  picked  up  clues  that  enabled  him  not  merely  to 
revise  but  to  reckon,  to  bring  the  reeling  panorama 
into  focus,  to  attain  a  comprehension  that  meant 
neither  starvation  for  his  tribal  loyalties  nor  suffoca- 
tion in  the  squalors  of  partisanship. 

It  is  this  comprehension  that  Mr.  Russell's  col- 
leagues of  Cambridge  University  and  the  small- 
brained  censorship  were  afraid  of.  They  were 
afraid  to  see  their  cause  taken  out  of  the  hothouse 
of  propaganda  and  exposed  to  fresh  air.  And  yet 
what  had  they  to  fear?  It  is  true  that  Mr.  Russell 
believes  in  the  principle  of  growth.  He  does  not 
think  that  private  landlordism  is  good  for  the 
citizenship  as  a  whole.  He  thinks  that  conscientious 

[  333  ] 


parents  find  it  very  expensive  to  bring  up  babies, 
and  that  they  will  go  on  exercising  birth-control  until 
the  state  faces  this  economic  factor  in  population. 
He  thinks  that  the  monarchical  organization  of  in- 
dustry must  be  swept  away.  He  thinks  the  present 
systems  of  education  in  Germany  and  France  and 
America  are  subservient  to  privilege  and  narrow  pa- 
triotism. He  thinks  that  many  women  find  mother- 
hood unsatisfying,  that  the  romantic  movement  was 
bad  in  putting  too  much  emphasis  on  personal  love 
and  that  some  sort  of  "  infinite  purpose  "  must  be 
shared  by  people  in  marriage  if  they  are  to  develop. 
He  thinks  illicit  love  is  unsatisfactory.  He  does  not 
entirely  agree  with  the  socialists  or  the  pragmatists 
or  the  labor  leaders  or  the  imperialists  or  the  bishops. 
He  does  not  regard  the  diminution  of  poverty  as 
anything  more  than  a  preface  to  politics.  He  sees 
danger  in  labor's  attitude  toward  thought.  He  criti- 
cizes religion  and  marriage  and  war  and  property 
and  education  in  their  character  as  political  institu- 
tions, and  he  criticizes  the  great  state  for  the  multiple 
opportunities  it  offers  to  corrupt  and  ambitious  and 
ruthless  men,  and  its  disadvantages  for  democracy. 
But  while  many  of  his  criticisms  are  unsparing,  none 
of  them  is  devious  or  poisoned.  The  principles  of 
democracy  and  liberty  are  frankly  and  utterly  his 
principles.  And  nothing  but  a  barren  conception  of 
these  quite  insistent  questions,  a  tremulous  regard 
for  property  and  the  church  and  every  other  estab- 
lishment, could  have  led  England  to  restrict  and 
handicap  him. 

It  is  not  that  Bertrand  Russell  is  an  impossiblist. 
"  In  spite  of  all  the  destruction  which  is  wrought  by 
the  impulses  that  lead  to  war,"  he  avows,  "  there  is 

[  334  ] 


more  hope  for  a  nation  which  has  these  impulses  than 
for  a  nation  in  which  all  impulse  is  dead."  Mr. 
Russell  is  not  Chinafied.  Nor  is  he  a  person  of  mere 
intellect,  a  fish.  "  Mind,  in  its  dealings  with  instinct, 
is  merely  critical:  so  far  as  instinct  is  concerned,  the 
unchecked  activity  of  the  mind  is  apt  to  be  destructive 
and  to  generate  cynicism.  Spirit  is  an  antidote  to 
the  cynicism  of  the  mind:  it  universalizes  the  emo- 
tions that  spring  from  instinct,  and  by  universalizing 
them  makes  them  impervious  to  mental  criticism." 
The  claims  of  the  spirit  have  Mr.  Russell's  full  and 
free  acknowledgment.  Where  he  differs  from  the 
partisan  is  simply  in  the  price  he  is  willing  to  pay 
to  keep  men  from  going  to  the  shambles,  in  the 
accent  he  lays  on  such  words  as  honor  and  self- 
respect  and  national  pride.  He  understands  per- 
fectly well  that  the  enemy  has  to  be  fought,  as  the 
fighting  insect  has  to  be  crushed.  But  he  knows  that 
to  exterminate  that  insect  he  must  eventually  drain 
marshes,  not  use  lotions  and  build  screens. 

Many  passages  in  Why  Men  Fight  indicate  that 
Mr.  Russell  is  neither  omniscient  nor  entirely  con- 
sistent. He  seems  to  dispose  of  incompatibilities 
easily,  and  yet  to  demand  radical  changes,  "  if  the 
world  is  to  be  saved."  He  is  aware  of  diplomatic 
iniquities  such  as  occurred  in  Persia,  and  yet  he  has 
great  hope  of  super-legal  arrangements  based  on  the 
claimants'  force.  Granted  that  he  is  vulnerable,  if 
not  in  these  in  other  respects,  the  fact  remains  that  he 
has  reached  the  height  for  large  survey  of  this  war. 
It  is  not  an  altitude  of  rhetoric  or  evangelical  spirit. 
It  is  the  angle  for  penetrating  vision.  He  accepts 
man  as  he  is,  nationalism,  industrialism,  civilization. 
On  that  basis,  candidly,  searchingly,  commodiously, 

[  335  ] 


he  entertains  the  problem  of  the  war.  If  he  declines 
to  believe  that  blind  patriotic  impulses  give  the  an- 
swer it  is  not  because  he  is  unpatriotic.  There  are 
in  himself  the  deep  sources  of  patriotism.  But  he 
cares  too  much  for  his  country  not  to  remind  it  of 
mankind. 

February  3 


[  336] 


DOMESTICATING  MARS 

ONE  ought  to  be  a  Rip  Van  Winkle  to  get  the  full 
effect  of  Mr.  Perry's  book.  It  marks  a  change  in 
American  attitude  which  only  one  who  could  exclude 
recent  events  might  properly  estimate.  Ten  years 
ago  there  was  about  as  much  sentiment  in  this  coun- 
try for  compulsory  military  service  as  there  is  at  this 
moment  for  compulsory  child-bearing.  Compulsory 
military  service  was  an  expedient  that  simply  did  not 
enter  the  calculations  of  the  ordinary  American. 
Great  hopes  could  be  entertained  of  the  Swiss  initia- 
tive and  the  Swiss  referendum,  but  the  Swiss  army 
scheme  seemed  as  little  appropriate  to  the  United 
States  as  the  United  States  navy  scheme  would  be 
to  Switzerland.  Conscription  was  a  specialty  of  con- 
tinental Europe  as  remote  from  this  country  as  mon- 
archy itself.  There  was  not  so  much  a  sentiment 
against  it  as  a  general  assumption  that  it  was  alien, 
archaic,  illiberal,  inconceivable.  And  now,  out  of 
the  thick  of  a  sophisticated  society,  a  Harvard  pro- 
fessor argues  "  universal "  military  service  with 
every  indication  of  representing  a  definite  body  of 
American  opinion.  It  is  the  kind  of  change  for 
which  only  a  huge  subversive  experience  can  account. 
Why  does  Mr.  Perry  support  the  cause  of  con- 
scription? To  read  his  articles  innocently,  one  might 
suppose  that  universal  military  duty  recommended 

The  Free  Man  and  the  Soldier,  by  Ralph  Barton  Perry.    Scrib- 
ners,  New  York. 

[  337  ] 


itself  to  him  on  the  ground  that  it  was  the  "  demo- 
cratic "  method  of  providing  security  for  the  country. 
He  argues  the  case  for  it  on  this  plausible  score,  as 
also  on  the  score  of  its  educational  and  social  advan- 
tages. But  the  merits  of  universal  military  service, 
precisely  the  same  ten  years  ago  as  they  are  to-day, 
are  necessarily  Mr.  Perry's  afterthoughts.  If  it 
were  not  for  the  European  war,  and  for  one  special 
circumstance  of  it,  it  is  practically  certain  that  he 
would  no  more  ask  for  compulsory  soldiering  than 
for  compulsory  road-making  or  scavenging  or  butch- 
ering or  fire-extinguishing.  A  "  democracy  implies 
that  there  shall  be  neither  privilege  nor  immunity," 
he  urges  earnestly.  But  privilege  and  immunity  are 
saving  most  of  us  from  the  uglier  chores  every  day. 
It  is  not  reasoning  like  this  that  led  Mr.  Perry  to 
come  to  a  belief  in  compulsory  service.  He  came 
to  it  above  all,  one  seems  to  see,  because  he  accepted 
America's  "  genuine  peril,"  the  "  hazard  of  war." 
The  upset  of  the  balance  of  power  in  Europe  has  torn 
most  American  minds  from  their  moorings.  What 
security  can  there  be  in  a  world  where  such  a  thing 
can  happen?  And  what  is  the  good  of  living  in  a 
world  where  things  can  be  so  insecure?  The  be- 
havior of  the  Germans,  in  particular,  seems  to  con- 
vince Mr.  Perry  of  the  necessity  for  being  prepared. 
!He  usually  couches  his  phrases  this  way:  "  The  scale 
and  the  method  of  modern  warfare  make  universal 
training  not  only  an  appropriate  means,  but  an  indis- 
pensable means."  But  he  is  really  apprehending 
wanton  invasion.  The  Germans  deliberately  let  hell 
loose  in  Europe  and  it  is  through  the  light  of  this 
appalling  and  infamous  fact  that  Mr.  Perry  sees  mil- 
itary possibilities  and  calculates  international  affairs. 

[  338  ] 


He  does  not  say  so  directly  but  all  through  his  book, 
on  pp.  12,  34,  56,  62,  65,  136,  145,  he  betrays  the 
shock  that  the  Germans  dealt  to  his  universe,  and 
he  infers  from  their  action  a  definite  hateful  danger. 
It  is  a  condition,  he  seems  to  say,  and  not  a  theory 
that  confronts  us :  we  are  dealing  here  with  the  kind 
of  evil  willfulness  that  we  must  either  obey  or  de- 
stroy. There  are  forces  of  destruction  in  the  world 
which  "  must  be  met,  each  according  to  its  kind,  by 
the  forces  of  deliverance."  And  he  seems  only  sorry 
that  the  United  States  had  not  its  forces  of  deliver- 
ance available  in  1914  to  enter  the  European  war. 
"  We  cannot  afford  to  cherish  any  ideal  whatsoever 
unless  at  the  same  time  we  are  willing  to  put  forth 
the  effort  that  is  commensurate  with  its  realization." 
And  that  effort  may  well  be  military.  "  There  is  no 
fair  escape  from  the  tragic  paradox  that  man  must 
destroy  in  order  to  save." 

The  neutralism  and  non-resistance  of  pacifists  im- 
pels Mr.  Perry  to  emphasize  the  role  of  force. 
Force  is  justifiable  in  its  war  on  lawlessness.  "  It 
is  provident  and  constructive  in  its  ulterior  effect." 
"  With  this  principle  in  mind,"  he  continues,  "  we 
may  now  take  a  further  step  and  justify  offensive 
war,  when  undertaken  in  the  interest  of  an  inter- 
national system  or  league  of  humanity."  "  Strength 
without  high  purpose  is  soulless  and  brutal;  purpose 
without  strength  is  unreal  and  impotent."  For  the 
accomplishment  of  civilization,  in  fact,  "  it  becomes 
necessary  to  use  the  harsh  and  dangerous  instruments 
by  which  things  are  done  in  this  world.  Civilization 
is  not  saved  by  the  mere  purging  of  one's  heart,  but 
by  the  work  of  one's  hands." 

Once  Mr.  Perry  conceives  of  war  by  his  own  coun- 
[  339  ] 


try  as  inevitably  war  on  lawlessness  he  can  easily 
wave  aside  the  foible  of  "  conscientiousness."  In 
wartime  a  citizen  who  does  not  approve  of  the  war 
must  bide  his  time. 

If  his  conscience  is  offended,  so  much  the  worse  for  his 
conscience.  What  he  needs  is  a  new  conscience  which  will 
teach  him  to  keep  the  faith  with  his  fellows  until  such  time 
as  their  common  understanding  and  their  controlling  policy 
shall  have  been  modified.  The  man  who  refuses  to  obey  the 
law  or  play  the  game  because  he  has  been  outvoted  is  more 
likely  to  be  afflicted  with  peevishness  or  egotism  than  exalted 
by  heroism. 

Granted  the  peril  of  war  and  the  virtue  of  one's 
country,  this  is  clearly  the  way  to  talk.  One  must 
emphasize,  however,  that  it  is  exactly  the  way  Ger- 
mans have  talked,  and  created  terror  by  doing  so. 
They  have  said  to  Liebknecht:  "  So  much  the  worse 
for  your  conscience !  "  How  is  it  that  a  brave  and 
patriotic  Harvard  professor  should  so  simply  follow 
the  German  example,  so  simply  dwell  on  the  problem 
of  asserting  righteousness,  so  little  dwell  on  the  an- 
terior problem  of  ascertaining  it?  He  does  not 
mention  an  "  iron  ring  "  that  threatens  to  choke  us, 
but  he  does  insist  on  "  lawlessness  "  in  other  nations, 
and,  with  an  extraordinary  faith  in  the  efficacy  of 
force,  does  think  of  it  as  our  means  —  our  chief 
means  —  of  furthering  high  international  purposes. 
A  sainthood  on  our  side,  a  dragon  on  the  other,  he 
nerves  our  sainthood  to  the  need  of  gouging  the 
dragon.  For  that  purpose  he  wants  us  universally 
trained  to  kill. 

At  base  it  is  a  fine  impulse  that  forces  Mr.  Perry 
to  consider  war  as  an  American  possibility.  The 

[  340  ] 


phenomenon  of  the  jingo  has  nothing  to  do  with  him 
—  and  indeed  the  jingo,  the  undeveloped  man  who 
wants  his  country  to  bully  other  countries,  is  too 
scared  to  peep  at  present.  Mr.  Perry  is  neither 
maudlin  nor  melodramatic.  He  is  simply  resolute 
about  facing  what  he  conceives  to  be  a  newly  condi- 
tioned world,  a  world  in  which  hateful  facts  present 
themselves,  regardless  of  the  facts  we  prefer.  Life, 
as  he  sees  it,  contains  an  unsuspected  range  of  inimi- 
cal possibilities,  unsuspected  threats  to  security.  He 
is  prepared  to  accept  those  threats  and  to  pay  a  price 
for  insuring  against  them. 

A  man  must  be  brave  to  counter  Mr.  Perry  by 
minimizing  the  practical  danger  of  war.  He  is 
bound,  in  the  first  place,  to  be  sure  he  is  not  evasive 
in  circumstances  where  it  is  supremely  natural  to 
evade.  At  the  end  of  Hedda  Gabler  Brack  is  ac- 
tually in  the  room  when  Hedda  shoots  herself,  but 
so  unforeseen,  so  unwelcome,  is  her  act,  he  exclaims 
that  these  things  don't  happen.  Thus  works  the  dia- 
phragm of  habit.  When  the  doctor  says,  "  You 
have  cancer,"  you  do  not  believe  him.  You  want  to 
close  your  eyes  and  then  wake  up  out  of  your  dream 
into  a  world  still  humane.  When  the  man  near  you 
shouts,  "  The  boat  is  going  down,"  you  want  to  hit 
him.  The  awful,  unescapable  fact  provides  such  un- 
merited suffering  that  you  feel  entitled  to  deny  it. 
The  notion  of  justice  persists  in  the  teeth  of  every- 
thing, even  resorts  to  a  theory  of  "  compensation  " 
and  poses  a  mysterious  Handicapper  who  has  a  "  be- 
nign "  intention  at  the  bottom  of  it  all.  To  ward 
anguish  from  our  nerves  is  automatic.  It  is  there- 
fore all  too  easy  to  substitute  preference  for  observa- 
tion, or  to  act  the  ostrich.  And  only  those  who  are 

[  34i  ] 


born  with  a  noble  capacity  for  reality  can  let  anguish 
touch  their  nerves  without  sealing  their  minds. 

Something  of  this  capaciousness  for  unwelcome  ex- 
perience, I  believe,  and  something  of  transfiguring 
patriotism,  inform  Mr.  Ralph  Barton  Perry's  atti- 
tude toward  the  war.  The  readjustment  of  Ameri- 
can society  which  he  proposes  is  so  great,  however, 
that  before  assenting  to  it  one  must  be  sure  that  nor- 
mal pacific  experience  has  really  been  subverted,  and 
that  compulsory  service  is  the  price  to  pay  for  peace. 
Such,  certainly,  does  not  seem  to  me  to  be  the  case. 
And  one  seeks  in  vain  in  Mr.  Perry's  book  for  two 
essential  points.  First,  a  demonstration  that  it  is 
not  Mr.  Perry's  own  inexperience  in  the  ways  of 
foreign  policy  and  European  states  that  causes  the 
German  act  to  look  so  monstrous.  Second,  a  demon- 
stration that  Mr.  Perry  has  considered  the  army  and 
navy  establishment  in  relation  to  geography  and  the 
rest.  Unless  a  man  is  informed  on  these  points,  he 
is  in  danger  of  making  false  analogies,  perhaps  the 
greatest  danger  that  partial  sophistication  involves. 

It  is  as  a  philosopher,  however,  that  Mr.  Perry 
is  most  to  be  criticized.  He  can  best  be  criticized 
in  his  own  words.  Because  his  patriotism  has  been 
violently  stimulated  by  Germany's  aggression,  he  con- 
cludes that  we  must  be  expedient.  Perhaps  he  sus- 
pects himself  of  a  squeamishness  that  might  endanger 
his  country.  He  will  not  flabbily  vacillate,  procras- 
tinate, contemplate.  He  will  lift  his  eyes  from  his 
navel.  Grim  business  is  afoot.  A  condition,  not  a 
theory,  has  arisen  and  he  will  hold  himself  ready  to 
lend  a  hand.  But  "  the  practical  man,"  he  says  him- 
self, "  is  always  confronted  by  a  condition.  I  shall 
suggest  presently  that  every  condition  does  in  truth 

[  342  ] 


involve  a  theory;  but  if  so,  the  practical  man  ignores 
it.  ...  His  problem  is  the  comparatively  narrow 
and  simple  problem  of  finding  the  instrument  to  fit 
the  occasion  and  achieve  the  result." 

This  is  just  the  point  about  war.  It  is  a  platitude 
that  inoffensiveness  cannot  solve  life,  and  most  of 
us  will  agree  to  destroy  rather  than  be  destroyed. 
But  it  is  mad  to  say,  "  to  be  effective  in  this  world 
is  to  hazard  a  judgment  and  to  commit  oneself  to 
it."  When  men  tremble  on  the  brink  of  a  bestial 
wastefulness  like  warfare  —  men  who  on  both  sides 
possess  impulses,  as  Mr.  Perry  says,  but  are  not  pos- 
sessed by  them  —  the  determining  fact  may  be,  and 
ought  to  be,  their  estimate  of  the  savagery  and  dis- 
pensability of  war.  A  philistine  may  not  feel  this. 
He  may  insist  that  "  the  work  of  civilization  is  to 
make  the  right  also  mighty,  so  that  it  may  obtain 
among  men  and  prevail."  But  there  are  such  ob- 
jections to  war  in  itself,  to  the  temper  preceding  it, 
the  brutality  it  releases,  the  "  butcher's  bills,"  the 
wounds  it  poisons,  that  a  philosopher's  position 
should  much  rather  be  one  that  keeps  these  things 
in  mind  than  one  that  gilds  with  "  higher  purposes  " 
and  "  qualities  of  idealism  "  mankind's  most  obvious 
of  hideous  lapses.  It  takes  two  to  keep  the  peace, 
but  the  peace  is  a  basic  desideratum,  and  Mr.  Perry 
is  far  too  much  concerned  about  America's  direct 
interests  as  against  enemies  than  about  her  working 
for  the  terms  on  which  the  world  can  keep  friends. 

Short-range  practicality,  says  Mr.  Perry,  "  means 
a  readiness  to  meet  the  immediate  occasion  as  is  dic- 
tated by  the  momentary  desire.  Such  practicality 
is  a  perpetual  meeting  of  emergencies.  It  is  a  sort 
of  living  from  hand  to  mouth,  an  uninspired  and 

[  343  ] 


unillumined  opportunism.  That  which  is  ordi- 
narily condemned  as  unpractical,  and  which  is  un- 
practical from  this  narrow  standpoint,  may  now  be 
called  long-range  practicality.  That  is  to  say,  it  is 
that  prevision,  that  thorough  intellectual  equipment, 
that  wisdom  as  to  the  ultimate  and  comparative 
worth  of  things,  without  which  there  can  be  no 
security  nor  any  confirming  sense  of  genuine  achieve- 
ment. It  is  that  which  makes  the  difference  between 
making  a  fool  of  oneself,  however,  earnestly  and 
even  successfully,  and  living  in  a  manner  which  would 
be  able  to  endure  the  test  of  time." 

These  words  of  Mr.  Perry  are  severe,  but  they 
apply  with  astonishing  directness  to  The  Free  Man 
and  the  Soldier.  It  is  a  courageous  and  loyal  book, 
but  it  is  marred  by  short-range  practicality.  Death 
is  beyond  words  preferable  to  losing  liberty,  honor 
or  self-respect.  This  Mr.  Perry  is  valiant  enough  to 
see.  What  he  fails  to  see  is  the  loss  of  liberty,  honor 
and  self-respect  involved  in  every  war  that  could  be 
avoided.  If  he  saw  this  more  clearly,  he  might  plan 
more  for  security  by  ways  of  understanding  rather 
than  ways  of  force. 

September  9,  1916. 


[  344  ] 


THE  COST  OF  PEACE 

COMPARATIVELY  few  people  know  the  work 
of  Thorstein  Veblen.  Some  thousands  have  read 
his  best-known  book,  the  brilliant,  drastic  Theory  of 
the  Leisure  Class;  but  only  a  few  hundred  have  read 
his  Theory  of  Business  Enterprise,  his  Instinct  of 
Workmanship  and  his  Imperial  Germany.  So  little 
is  he  known  that  a  pretentious  man  the  other  day  met 
my  mention  of  The  Nature  of  Peace  by  saying: 
"  Ah,  of  course,  a  new  translation."  He  did  not 
know  that  Thorstein  Veblen  was  an  American,  was 
graduated  from  an  American  university,  in  the 
eighties,  and  has  been  teaching  in  American  uni- 
versities ever  since.  Mr.  Veblen  is  an  American 
writer  but  the  kind  of  American  writer  whose  merit 
is  rather  more  clearly  recognized  abroad  than  at 
home,  an  American  who  ought  to  have  been  a  for- 
eigner to  be  appreciated  in  America. 

To  read  Mr.  Veblen  is  not  and  cannot  be  an  enter- 
tainment. There  is  a  kind  of  fashionable  lady  who 
knows  precisely  when  a  literary  Paquin  has  ceased 
to  be  the  thing,  and  who  twitters  as  unfailingly  as 
any  bird  at  the  first  breath  of  another  master's 
dawn.  For  all  this  turn  for  novelty,  few  ladies  have 
twittered  much  or  are  ever  going  to  twitter  much 
about  Mr.  Veblen's  performance.  He  is  too  diffi- 
cult to  understand.  It  is  hard  intellectual  labor  to 

An  Inquiry  into  the  Nature  of  Peace  and  the  Terms  of  Its  Pei> 
petuation,  by  Thorstein  Veblen.     Macmillan,  New  York, 

[  345  ] 


read  any  of  his  books,  and  to  skim  him  is  impossible. 
He  is  not  a  luxurious  valley  of  easy  reading,  a  philo- 
sophic Tennyson.  He  is  a  mountain  —  stubborn, 
forbidding,  purgatorial.  There  is  no  funicular  to 
bring  him  under  subjection  of  the  indolent,  and  some- 
times there  is  barely  a  foothold  even  for  the  hardy 
amid  the  tortuosities  of  his  style.  But  the  reward 
for  those  who  do  persist  in  reading  him  is  com- 
mensurate with  the  effort.  No  mountain  pierces  to 
heaven,  not  even  Mr.  Veblen's,  but  the  area  that  he 
unrolls  is  strategically  chosen  and  significantly  in- 
clusive. Part  of  the  reward  of  reading  him  may  be 
like  the  reward  of  mountain-climbing  itself,  the  value 
of  tough  exercise  for  its  own  sake,  but  unless  Mr. 
Veblen  created  the  conviction  that  his  large  purposes 
did  reasonably  necessitate  intricate  and  laborious 
processes  of  thought  and  that  such  processes  had  to 
be  followed  in  detail  in  order  that  his  argument  might 
be  mastered,  no  one  would  be  quite  satisfied  to  take 
the  pains  he  exacts.  The  greatest  justification  of 
such  pains  is  the  final  sense  conveyed  by  him  that 
he  has  had  a  singular  contribution  to  make,  and  has 
made  it  with  complete  regard  to  the  formidable  re- 
quirements of  responsible  unconventional  utterance. 
The  responsible  unconventionality  of  Mr.  Veblen 
has  never  been  better  exemplified  than  in  this  new 
book  of  his,  finished  February,  1917,  on  the  nature 
of  peace.  It  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  the  most  momen- 
tous work  in  English  on  the  encompassment  of  last- 
ing peace.  There  are  many  books  that  aim  to  give 
geographic  domicile  to  the  kind  of  tinkered  peace 
that  is  likely  to  come  out  of  this  war,  but  I  know  of 
no  book  that  gives  so  plain  and  positive  account  of 
the  terms  "  on  which  peace  at  large  may  be  hopefully 

[  346  ] 


installed  and  maintained,"  and  I  know  of  no  discus- 
sion so  searching  as  to  "  what  if  anything  there  is  in 
the  present  situation  that  visibly  makes  for  a  realiza- 
tion of  these  necessary  terms  within  a  calculable 
future."  Those  who  are  acquainted  with  Mr.  Veb- 
len's  work  are  aware  of  the  ironic  inscrutability  of 
his  manner,  the  detachment  that  is  at  once  an  evi- 
dence of  his  impartiality  and  an  intimation  of  his 
corrosive  skepticism.  It  may  no  longer  be  said,  with 
The  Nature  of  Peace  under  examination,  that  either 
impartiality  or  skepticism  induces  Mr.  Veblen  to 
withhold  his  preference,  to  conceal  his  bias,  in  the 
present  contingency.  That  bias,  however,  does  not 
lead  him  into  any  of  the  current  patriotic  extrava- 
gances. If  critical  acid  can  corrode  the  patriotic 
conceptions  of  "  democracy  "  and  "  liberty  "  that  are 
now  so  familiar,  Mr.  Veblen  makes  no  attempt  to 
keep  such  fancies  from  being  eaten  into.  What  is 
left,  however,  is  sufficiently  substantial  to  give  him 
the  issue  that  abides  in  the  war,  and  its  bearing  on 
peace,  and  it  provides  him  with  his  clue  to  the  great 
eventuality,  "  the  consequences  presumably  due  to 
follow."  ' 

It  would  be  wrong  in  any  review  of  Mr.  Veblen 
to  give  a  mere  bald  outline  of  the  work  that  is  so  full 
of  his  manifold  mind.  There  are  so  many  "  patent 
imbecilities"  (like  the  protective  tariff),  so  many 
current  egregious  practices  (like  business  men's  sabot- 
age), that  receive  characteristic  illumination  in  tran- 
sit, the  bare  colorless  statement  of  his  conclusions 
would  completely  leave  out  the  poignancy  that  ac- 
cumulates as  he  proceeds.  His  conclusions  are,  on 
the  other  hand,  impressive  enough  to  indicate  the 
importance  of  the  argument  back  of  them,  and  if 
[  347  ] 


only  for  their  suggestion  of  the  massive  argument 
they  need  to  be  reported.  Defeat  for  the  German- 
Imperial  coalition,  not  victory  for  the  Entente  bel- 
ligerents, is  the  first  step  toward  lasting  peace  that 
he  recognizes,  because  of  the  decisive  difference  "  be- 
tween those  people  whose  patriotic  affections  centre 
about  the  fortunes  of  an  impersonal  commonwealth 
and  those  in  whom  is  superadded  a  fervent  aspiration 
for  dynastic  ascendancy."  Peace  on  terms  of  Ger- 
many's unconditional  surrender  is  not  discussed  by 
Mr.  Veblen  on  the  basis  of  likelihood  but  on  the 
basis  of  its  desirability  in  relation  to  the  chances  for 
peace,  and  the  unlikelihood  of  lasting  peace  in  its  ab- 
sence. But  this  is  not  the  ordinary  orgiastic  con- 
templation of  an  enemy  destroyed.  The  elements 
in  Germany  that  conspire  against  lasting  peace  are 
carefully  computed,  and  the  terms  of  their  disintegra- 
tion discussed  in  every  detail.  It  is  by  no  means  for- 
gotten that  if  the  victorious  side  is  not  "  shorn  over 
the  comb  of  neutralization  and  democracy  "  there 
can  in  any  event  be  no  prospect  of  perpetuating  peace. 
The  present  unfitness  of  Germany  (or  Japan)  for 
lasting  peace  is  ascribed  by  Mr.  Veblen  to  the  essen- 
tial dynastic  need  for  warlike  enterprise,  but  he  has 
no  hesitation  whatever  in  declaring  in  regard  to  the 
Allied  Powers  that  peace  in  general  demands  the 
"  relinquishment  of  all  those  undemocratic  institu- 
tional survivals  out  of  which  international  grievances 
are  wont  to  arise."  This  is  not  the  customary  em- 
phasis of  good-will  pacifists.  They  are  fain  to  pro- 
pose peace  on  the  present  basis  of  "  national  jeal- 
ousies and  discriminations  "  and  what  Mr.  Veblen 
in  his  highly  personal  jargon  calls  "discrepancies." 
Mr.  Veblen  alludes  to  the  League  to  Enforce  Peace 

[  348  ] 


as  a  movement  for  the  "  collusive  safeguarding  of 
national  discrepancies  for  force  of  arms."  This  tol- 
eration of  existing  nationalisms  Mr.  Veblen  plainly 
regards  as  an  insuperable  obstacle  to  peace.  He  ex- 
poses in  every  detail  the  predisposition  to  war  that 
inheres  in  nationalisms.  "  What  the  peace-makers 
might  logically  be  expected  to  concern  themselves 
about  would  be  the  elimination  of  these  discrepancies 
that  make  for  embroilment." 

The  military  defeat  of  Germany  seems  to  the 
author  a  requisite  step  on  the  direct  path  to  peace. 
This  is  only  because  Germany  is  dynastic,  however, 
and  the  German  people  subservient  to  the  dynasty. 
One  of  the  issues  most  thoroughly  debated  by  Mr. 
Veblen  is  the  pregnant  issue  of  German  democratiza- 
tion, and  while  he  lays  great  stress  on  the  necessity 
for  military  defeat  as  a  first  requirement  of  democ- 
ratization he  does  not  believe  the  disintegrating 
of  Germany's  dynastic  "  second  nature  "  is  of  so 
hopeless  a  character  as  its  historic  persistence  might 
imply.  There  is  no  complacency  in  the  attitude  that 
leads  him  to  regard  imperial  Germany  (or  imperial 
Japan)  as  a  stumbling-block  in  the  road  to  lasting 
peace.  It  is  an  attitude  founded  on  a  strict  and  even 
solicitous  estimate  of  the  patent  German  and  Jap- 
anese aims.  And  in  so  far  as  a  peace  policy  involves 
treatment  of  the  German  people  Mr.  Veblen  is  quite 
certain  that  no  trade  discrimination  against  them, 
necessarily  bound  to  recoil  on  the  common  people, 
would  be  pacifically  effective  or  justifiable.  The 
persecution  of  the  German  common  people  could 
take  no  form  that  would  conceivably  advance  the 
cause  of  peace,  and  Mr.  Veblen  is  careful  to  disso- 
ciate his  belief  that  Germany  should  be  beaten  from 

[  349  ] 


the  belief  that  the  people  of  Germany  should  be  made 
to  suffer  for  their  differentiation  after  the  war. 

Where  The  Nature  of  Peace  seems  to  me  to  rise 
far  and  away  above  the  current  discussions  of  super- 
nationalism  is  in  its  comparative  freedom  from  un- 
analyzed  conceptions.  There  is  nothing  sacred  to 
Mr.  Veblen  in  the  conception  of  patriotism,  of  prop- 
erty, of  success,  of  manliness,  of  good  breeding,  of 
national  honor,  of  prestige.  The  notion  of  non- 
resistance  has  no  terrors  for  him  —  he  writes  a  chap- 
ter on  its  merits.  But  so  dry  is  he  that  it  is  only  one 
reading  him  attentively  who  will  gather  his  extraor- 
dinarily subversive  character,  his  invincible  mind. 
The  blessedness  of  this  unsparing  intelligence  is  so 
great  that  one  has  a  constant  acute  pleasure  in  pur- 
suing Mr.  Veblen's  argument.  If  one  had  long  per- 
ceived for  oneself,  for  example,  that  "  business  " 
means  waste  and  inefficiency,  it  is  pleasant  to  have 
Mr.  Veblen  introduce  the  same  perceptions,  but  when 
he  proceeds  to  locate  them  in  his  spacious  under- 
standing of  the  whole  international  problem,  and  to 
reveal  their  unquestionable  bearing  on  the  alterna- 
tives of  war  and  peace,  one  has  a  happy  conscious- 
ness of  coming  honestly  to  a  wider  and  deeper  view 
of  realities.  This  is  the  supreme  gift  of  Mr.  Veb- 
len's disinterested  inquiry. 

The  notion  that  a  lasting  peace  is  compatible  with 
the  established  patriotic  order  of  things,  with  the 
status  of  the  gentleman  in  England  or  the  business 
man  in  the  United  States,  is  not  entertained  for  one 
moment  by  Mr.  Veblen,  and  regardless  of  the 
"  maggoty  conceit  of  national  domination  "  which 
demands  "  the  virtual  erasure  of  the  Imperial  dyn- 
asty," he  sees  an  impediment  to  peace  in  the  dear 

[  350  J 


establishments  of  "  upperclass  and  pecuniary  con- 
trol "  in  the  allied  commonwealths.  Chief  and 
foremost  in  the  pacific  arrangement  must  come  "  a 
considerable  degree  of  neutralization,  extending  to 
virtually  all  national  interests  and  pretensions,  but 
more  particularly  to  all  material  and  commercial  in- 
terests of  the  federated  peoples;  and,  indispensably 
and  especially,  such  neutralization  would  have  to 
extend  to  the  nations  from  whom  aggression  is  now 
apprehended,  as,  e.g.,  the  German  people."  All 
manner  of  trade  discrimination  has  to  be  abolished 
— "  import,  export  and  excise  tariff,  harbor  and  reg- 
istry dues,  subsidy,  patent  right,  copyright,  trade 
mark,  tax  exemption  whether  partial  or  exclusive, 
investment  preferences  at  home  and  abroad."  Be- 
sides this  prescription  for  "  the  elimination  of  dis- 
crepancies that  make  for  embroilment,"  a  neutraliza- 
tion of  citizenship  is  also  indicated,  the  common  man 
standing  to  lose  nothing  by  these  revisions.  But 
Mr.  Veblen  is  frank  to  say  that  "  this  prospect  of 
consequences  "  points  to  a  general  revolution. 

It  has  appeared  in  the  course  of  the  argument  that  the 
preservation  of  the  present  pecuniary  law  and  order,  with 
all  its  incidents  of  ownership  and  investment,  is  incompatible 
with  an  unwarlike  state  of  peace  and  security.  This  current 
scheme  of  investment,  business,  and  sabotage,  should  have  an 
appreciably  better  chance  of  survival  in  the  long  run  if  the 
present  conditions  of  warlike  preparation  and  national  inse- 
curity were  maintained,  or  if  the  projected  peace  were  left 
in  a  somewhat  problematical  state,  sufficiently  precarious  to 
keep  national  animosities  alert,  and  thereby  to  the  neglect 
of  domestic  interests,  particularly  of  such  interests  as  touch 
the  popular  well-being.  On  the  other  hand,  it  has  also 
appeared  that  the  cause  of  peace  and  its  perpetuation  might 
be  materially  advanced  if  precautions  were  taken  beforehand 

[351  ] 


to  put  out  of  the  way  as  much  as  may  be  of  those  discrepan- 
cies of  interest  and  sentiment  between  nations  and  between 
classes  which  make  for  dissension  and  eventual  hostilities. 

The  weight  of  these  phrases  it  is  not  easy  to  catch 
in  passing,  but  nothing  more  significant  has  been 
written  since  the  outbreak  of  the  war.  One  has  only 
to  go  back  to  The  Theory  of  Business  Enterprise, 
published  in  1903,  to  learn  how  Mr.  Veblen  fore- 
saw this  war,  and  America's  participation  in  it. 
The  same  rigor  of  intellectual  standard  that  gave 
him  a  command  of  the  situation  at  that  time  is  dis- 
cernible in  this  present  volume,  and  gives  him  domi- 
nance now.  Such  severity  of  mind  as  Mr.  Veblen 
exhibits  is  not  likely  to  win  him  many  readers,  but 
the  recommendation  of  Mr.  Veblen  is  not  merely  the 
recommendation  of  a  great  philosopher  of  industrial- 
ism. It  is  not  his  relentless  logic  alone  that  elevates 
him.  It  is  the  democratic  bias  which  The  Nature 
of  Peace  indicates. 

May  26, 


[352] 


UNDER  FIRE 

I N  the  presence  of  this  book  one  is  in  the  presence 
of  the  fact.  It  is  known  to  all  of  us  that  where  hu- 
manity is  at  grips  with  its  own  destiny  it  is  the  habit 
of  men  to  lie.  The  great  finalities  are  always  con- 
cealed from  us  in  their  full  gravity  and  terror  — 
the  finalities  of  birth,  of  love,  of  death.  And  be- 
cause they  are  concealed  from  us,  with  the  zeal  of 
the  frightened  savage  that  is  in  all  of  us,  we  go  from 
catastrophe  to  catastrophe  as  numb  as  fools.  Only 
occasionally,  against  the  instinct  of  the  savage  that 
bids  us  sprinkle  holy  water  and  burn  incense  and 
heap  flowers,  does  a  man  arrive  who  accepts  his 
naked  destiny  and  insists  on  its  actual  nature  against 
every  kind  of  incantation.  Such  a  man,  confronted 
by  war,  is  Henri  Barbusse,  the  Parisian  journalist 
who  incorporates  his  whole  experience  in  this  book. 
It  is  unnecessary  to  have  been  at  the  front  to  judge 
of  M.  Barbusse's  veracity.  One  does  not  need  to 
have  killed  a  woman  to  accept  Crime  and  Punish- 
ment. Under  Fire,  as  the  sensitive  translation  is 
called,  impresses  its  veracity  in  revealing  its  satura- 
tion with  the  war.  There  are  other  experiences  of 
the  war,  as  there  are  other  men,  but  this  is  invincibly 
complete.  It  is  a  book  that  is  no  more  to  be  ques- 
tioned than  the  diary  of  Captain  Scott  or  the  death- 
less pages  of  Tolstoy.  It  composes  the  war  for  our 

Under  Fire,  by  Henri  Barbusse.     Translated  by  Fitzwater  Wray. 
Dutton,  New  York 

[  353  ] 


understanding,  making  us  familiar  at  the  beginning 
with  the  men  who  are  going  to  die,  initiating  us  into 
trench  life  before  the  charge  is  launched  over  the 
top,  ending  the  book  in  a  supreme  symbolism.  But 
the  wise  composition  that  unites  Under  Fire  is  no 
more  artificial  than  the  due  supervision  of  words  as 
they  stream  from  one's  own  brain  to  the  pen-point. 
The  facts  have  been  disposed,  even  as  a  pointillist 
disposes  colors,  only  to  keep  them  true. 

Against  the  tale  that  M.  Barbusse  has  told  there 
is  the  conspiracy  of  a  thousand  conventions.  He  is 
a  Frenchman  fighting  for  France,  la  belle  France,  in 
what  many  consider  the  last  extremity  of  her  effort 
to  remain  a  "  first-class  "  power.  To  sustain  that 
effort  it  is  vital,  even  if  untruth  is  required,  to  give 
a  good  account  of  the  organization  of  the  army  and 
its  esprit.  Not  only  should  he  define  favorably  the 
motives  that  inspire  the  soldier  but  he  should  show 
the  happy  democratic  relations  that  exist  between 
soldier  and  officer,  the  satisfaction  of  the  soldier  with 
the  general  staff  and  his  comprehension  of  the  plans 
of  the  army,  the  joyous  reception  that  awaits  him 
on  leave  of  absence,  the  self-immolation  of  the  civil- 
ians in  touch  with  the  army,  the  honesty  of  contrac- 
tors, the  sad  reluctance  of  brilliant  young  men  not 
permitted  to  fight  in  the  trenches,  the  evil  behavior 
of  the  enemy,  the  heroism  of  the  war.  Of  the  more 
obvious  conventions  these  are  a  few,  but  more  subtle 
conventions  abound  as  to  personal  attitude.  A  good 
patriot  is  not  supposed  to  tell  the  world  of  filth,  of 
lice,  of  corpses  in  ridiculous  attitudes,  of  bad  food, 
of  muck  in  language,  of  bloodshed  sought  and  en- 
joyed. If  a  man  tells  these  things  or  breathes  a 
word  contrary  to  the  unanimity  of  national  purpose, 

[354] 


he  is  treasonable.  The  facts  are  of  no  consequence. 
The  impossibility  of  keeping  them  suppressed  is  of 
no  consequence.  If  the  sun  rises  on  a  national  de- 
linquency or  ineptitude,  it  is  the  sun  that  is  treason- 
able. From  the  guns  of  such  a  conspiracy  M.  Bar- 
busse  is  also  under  fire. 

But  when  one  has  faced  machine-guns,  it  appears, 
it  is  not  impossible  to  face  machine-minds.  One  can 
feel  in  M.  Barbusse  a  disdain  for  those  feeble  men 
of  Europe  who,  within  boundaries  insisted  upon  by 
themselves,  brought  about  a  war  that  is  the  crashing 
bankruptcy  of  all  their  theories,  all  their  pretensions, 
their  idols,  their  sanctity.  With  demonology  their 
last  resource  in  order  to  strengthen  once  again  the 
political  boundaries  that  intensify  differences  in  lan- 
guage and  custom,  they  ask  M.  Barbusse  to  take  his 
mind  from  the  actuality  he  has  experienced,  and  dis- 
regard the  war  as  a  harvest  of  their  statesmanship. 
But  the  author  of  Under  Fire  is  too  sure  of  war  not 
to  be  sure  of  something  about  peace  which  is  more 
than  non-war.  He  is  for  peace,  not  a  peace  that 
will  save  his  own  skin  now  but  a  peace  that  will  be 
embodied  in  the  plans  of  a  society  which  takes  full 
stock  of  its  own  bestiality,  its  own  madness. 

It  is  not  the  picturesque  beginning  of  this  book 
that  lets  one  see  M.  Barbusse  the  accusant  of  war. 
He  is  content  at  the  beginning  to  give  us  the  mucky 
trench,  the  rag-bag  cave-dwellers  who  are  his  com- 
rades, the  Falstaffian  humor  of  their  masculinity,  the 
jocularity  that  is  the  jewel  in  the  toad.  The  first 
chapter  is  called  In  the  Earth;  it  is  properly  named. 
It  is  earthy  in  its  jests  at  the  old  territorials  who 
straggle  by,  "  worn-out  and  trench-foul  veterans  " ; 
earthy  in  its  grim  silence  at  the  passing  Africans, 

[  355  ] 


eyes  "like  balls  of  ivory  or  onyx";  earthy  in  its 
sneers  for  the  penmen  who  visit  the  trench.  The 
first  glimmerings  of  the  seriousness  of  battle  are  not 
utterly  somber.  "  The  smell  of  fresh  blood  was 
enough  to  bring  your  heart  up,"  but  that  is  from 
glad  men  "  whom  the  depths  of  horror  have  given 
back."  The  impression  is  allowed  to  accumulate 
fairly  and  steadily.  There  is  Eudoxie,  the  ethereal 
girl  pursued  by  an  oaf.  There  is  the  dizzying  com- 
plexity of  a  great  army  entraining.  There  is  the 
little  soldier  bereft,  by  an  accident  of  the  mails,  from 
his  week's  reunion  with  his  wife.  The  misery  of 
cold  Fouillade,  imprisoned  by  his  pennilessness  in  a 
wet  barn,  dreaming  of  his  scented  Pyrenees  —  this 
is  one  episode  of  those  remissions  from  fighting 
which  are  described  in  keen  detail.  The  most  elo- 
quent tells  of  that  stolen  journey  into  occupied  terri- 
tory on  which  Poterloo  got  home  —  to  see  Clotilde 
through  the  window,  smiling  by  the  side  of  a  Boche 
officer,  "  not  a  forced  smile,  not  a  debtor's  smile, 
non,  a  real  smile  that  came  from  her,  that  she  gave." 
It  is  on  an  adventure  with  Poterloo,  to  seek  some- 
where for  a  trace  of  his  house  in  the  eviscerated 
countryside,  that  the  tocsin  begins  to  sound.  Just 
as  at  lovely  seaside  places  one  sometimes,  a  little 
inland,  comes  on  a  spot  made  foul  by  the  heaped 
refuse  of  the  settlement,  so  Poterloo  and  the  nar- 
rator pass  through  the  spot  where  is  heaped  the 
human  refuse  of  the  fight.  There  are  pages  here, 
honorable  pages,  nobly  painful,  that  it  would  be 
sacrilege  to  quote.  It  is  at  this  point,  perhaps,  with 
the  disaster  to  Poterloo,  that  one  is  gripped  by  the 
inhuman  remorselessness  of  all  too  human  device. 
No  description  of  bombardment  surpasses  M. 
[  356  ] 


Barbusse's,  even  in  translation.  And  no  description 
of  going  forward,  so  it  seems  to  me,  can  equal  his 
chapter  Under  Fire.  To  quote  from  it  is  unfair. 
It  is  like  giving  one  stilled  picture  of  a  terrific  move- 
ment. But  there  is  a  glimpse  of  the  author's  total 
attitude  in  the  following  passage  that  demands  its 
inclusion : 

"  What  are  they  doing,  those  chaps?  " — "  It's  to  climb 
up  by." 

We  are  ready.  The  men  marshal  themselves,  still  silently, 
their  blankets  crosswise,  the  helmet-straps  on  the  chin,  lean- 
ing on  their  rifles.  I  look  at  their  pale,  contracted,  and  re- 
flective faces.  They  are  not  soldiers,  they  are  men.  They 
are  not  adventurers,  or  warriors,  or  made  for  human  slaugh- 
ter, neither  butchers  nor  cattle.  They  are  laborers  and  arti- 
sans whom  one  recognizes  in  their  uniforms.  They  are 
civilians  uprooted,  and  they  are  ready.  They  await  the 
signal  for  death  or  murder;  but  you  may  see,  looking  at 
their  faces  between  the  vertical  gleams  of  their  bayonets, 
that  they  are  simply  men. 

Each  one  knows  that  he  is  going  to  take  his  head,  his 
chest,  his  belly,  his  whole  body,  and  all  naked,  up  to  the 
rifles  pointed  forward,  to  the  shells,  to  the  bombs  piled  and 
ready,  and  above  all  to  the  methodical  and  almost  infallible 
machine-guns  —  to  all  that  is  waiting  for  him  yonder  and 
is  now  so  frightfully  silent  —  before  he  reaches  the  other 
soldiers  that  he  must  kill.  They  are  not  careless  of  their 
lives,  like  brigands,  nor  blinded  by  passion  like  savages.  In 
spite  of  the  doctrines  with  which  they  have  been  cultivated 
they  are  not  inflamed.  They  are  above  instinctive  excesses. 
They  are  not  drunk,  either  physically  or  morally.  It  is  in 
full  consciousness,  as  in  full  health  and  full  strength,  that 
they  are  massed  there  to  hurl  themselves  once  more  into 
that  sort  of  madman's  part  imposed  on  all  men  by  the  mad- 
ness of  the  human  race.  One  sees  the  thought  and  the 
fear  and  the  farewell  that  there  is  in  their  silence,  their  still- 

[  357  ] 


nss,  in  the  mask  of  tranquillity  which  unnaturally  grips  their 
faces.  They  are  not  the  kind  of  hero  one  thinks  of,  but  their 
sacrifice  has  greater  worth  than  they  who  have  not  seen 
them  will  ever  be  able  to  understand. 

Only  by  such  profound  acceptance  of  his  comrades 
is  M.  Barbusse  enabled  to  speak  as  he  does  in  the 
concluding  chapter,  and  also  in  that  moment  of  su- 
perb magnanimity  at  the  end  of  the  advance  when 
the  dignified  Bertrand  permits  himself  to  say,  "  It 
was  necessary,"  and  adds  that  immaculate  tribute, 
"  There  is  one  figure  that  has  risen  above  the  war 
and  will  blaze  with  the  beauty  and  strength  of  his 
courage.  .  .  ." 

It  was  necessary!  One  does  not  doubt  that  M. 
Barbusse  has  himself  said  so,  in  the  face  of  all  it 
means.  But  in  the  domicile  that  his  mind  gives  this 
war  there  is  no  mysticism,  no  patriotism,  no  acqui- 
escence. He  knows  that  the  war  is  evil.  He  has 
accepted  it  as  the  lesser  of  two  evils.  His  book  is 
great  because  it  is  able  to  encompass  everything, 
even  the  necessity  of  living  by  dying. 

October  27,  1917. 


[358] 


A  CLOUD  of  almost  indescribable  feeling  is 
aroused  by  this  memorial  of  T.  M.  Kettle.  If  it  is 
by  symbols  that  men  are  most  greatly  influenced,  the 
death  of  Kettle  at  Guillamont,  a  lieutenant  in  the 
Dublin  Fusiliers,  is  a  symbol  of  more  than  Irish  sig- 
nificance in  the  war.  A  death  in  itself,  what  is  it? 
One  of  the  most  casual  and  commonplace  accidents 
in  the  field  —  a  wound,  a  cough  of  blood,  the  ebb  of 
everything,  the  end.  No  countryman  of  Bernard, 
Shaw's  needs  to  be  told  how  unheroic  the  disaster  is, 
how  unlike  the  fifth  act  of  a  play.  Rupert  Brooke 
gives  his  life  to  his  country.  How?  By  meningitis 
following  a  carbuncle  on  his  upper  lip.  That  has 
more  the  accent  of  piteous  circumstance  than  the  gal- 
lantry of  a  charge.  But  the  most  sensitive  human 
being  escapes  cynicism  by  remembering  the  selection, 
the  intention,  which  preceded  the  indignity  of  battle. 
In  childbirth  there  is  also  considerable  indignity  for 
those  who  limit  themselves  to  the  facts. 

What  makes  Kettle's  death  significant,  with  that 
significance  we  so  bravely  borrow  for  mortality,  is 
the  place  from  which  he  came  to  it  out  of  the  social 
and  political  world.  Had  any  one  said  to  Kettle 
in  July,  1914,  that  he  would  die  a  lieutenant  in  the 
Dublin  Fusiliers,  the  irony  would  have  seemed  inor- 
dinate. In  July,  1914,  he  was  busy  buying  rifles  in 
Belgium  for  the  National  Volunteers.  Mock-heroic 

The  Ways  of  War,  by  T.  M.  Kettle.     Scribners,  New  York. 
[  359  ] 


as  that  mission  was,  in  the  militaristic  sense,  it  was 
at  any  rate  the  mission  of  a  man  who  had  made  so 
important  a  choice  for  his  country  as  to  take  the  risks 
of  the  contraband  traffic  in  arms.  The  son  of  a 
leading  Parnellite  Nationalist,  himself  a  Catholic 
Nationalist  who  had  quite  normally  taken  his  place 
as  a  member  of  parliament  before  he  had  become  a 
professor  of  economics  in  the  new  state-aided  Roman 
Catholic  university,  there  was  nothing  about  him  to 
indicate  the  degree  of  sympathy  with  the  British 
empire  that  a  commission  in  the  army  suggests.  It 
was  not  so  much  that  Kettle  was  out  of  sympathy 
with  the  empire.  He  was,  to  put  it  bluntly,  out  of 
the  empire.  And  the  strange  paradox  of  the  war, 
the  paradox  of  his  death  in  a  British  uniform,  was 
that  a  climax  in  political  feeling  should  have  com- 
pletely brought  him  in. 

Ireland  out  of  the  empire  —  that  may  seem  a  fan- 
tastic account  of  his  position.  To  debate  it  were 
impossible  without  lighting  up  every  old  political 
cicatrix  in  every  Catholic  Nationalist's  heart.  It  is 
enough  to  say  that  religious  and  national  prejudice 
builds  a  mountain  between  peoples,  and  at  the  steep 
side  of  that  slowly  eroding  mountain  T.  M.  Kettle 
dwelt.  "  One  of  the  most  brilliant  figures  in  the 
Young  Ireland  and  the  Young  Europe  of  his  time," 
as  the  prefatory  note  describes  him,  he  still  identi- 
fied himself  with  the  majority  of  his  people,  a  people 
unsatisfactorily  ruled,  not  yet  allowed  to  rule  them- 
selves. A  Catholic  Irishman,  there  was  no  function 
for  him  within  the  imperial  economy  which  would 
not  impoverish  his  national  present  and  estrange  him 
from  his  past.  "  One  of  the  most  brilliant  figures 
in  Young  Ireland,"  yes,  but  not  seriously  in  Europe. 

[  36o] 


The  pathos  and  heroism  of  his  nationalism,  as 
against  such  nationalism  as  Shaw's,  was  its  vindica- 
tion in  the  not  unimportant  realm  of  conduct,  involv- 
ing a  costly  exile  from  the  intellectual  Europe  in 
which  he  properly  belonged.  In  Dublin,  as  the 
memoir  so  frankly  states,  he  was  only  half  himself. 
And  his  writing  shows  well  enough  that,  favorably 
environed,  he  would  have  had  a  development  very 
different,  would  have  been  one  of  the  moving  and 
witty  and  superb  writers  of  his  age. 

Yet  when  the  tug  came  Kettle  promptly  enlisted 
and  went  recruiting  for  England,  learned  soldiering, 
did  his  stint  in  the  France  that  he  had  known  and 
appreciated,  stuck  to  his  regiment  in  spite  of  staff 
opportunities,  saw  action,  led  bravely,  and  died. 
Outside  the  glory  of  it,  which  throbs  in  Mrs.  Ket- 
tle's admirable  memoir,  there  is  the  poignant  expo- 
sition of  it  in  these  articles;  the  quick  extension  of 
nationalism  to  Belgium,  the  valiant  heady  Catholi- 
cism, the  romance  of  selflessness,  the  sumptuous  elo- 
quence of  partisanship,  the  penetrating  hatred  of 
war's  infidelity  to  humanism,  the  devoted  tribute  to 
common  soldiers,  the  growing  alarm  that  politicians 
could  manipulate  consecrated  causes,  the  words  writ- 
ten on  the  eve  of  death  — "  If  I  live  I  mean  to  spend 
the  rest  of  my  life  working  for  perpetual  peace.  I 
have  seen  war,  and  faced  modern  artillery,  and  I 
know  what  an  outrage  it  is  against  simple  men." 

'  To  be  above  passion  is  to  be  below  humanity." 
With  these  words,  and  words  like  them,  Kettle  em- 
braced the  cause  of  the  Allies.  "  The  Great  War 
was  in  its  origin  a  Great  Crime,  and  the  documents 
are  there  to  prove  it."  "  The  unchallengeable  fact 
remains  that  while  democracy  was  seeking  a  solution 


in  terms  of  peace,  '  the  old  German  God  '  forced  it 
in  terms  of  war."  "  Russia  has  her  vile  tyrannies. 
But  from  all  Russian  literature  there  comes  an  im- 
mense and  desolating  sob  of  humility  and  self-re- 
proach. Great  Britain  has  not  yet  liquidated  her  ac- 
count with  Ireland,  nor  altogether  purified  her  rela- 
tions with  India  and  Egypt.  But  Great  Britain  does 
not,  at  any  rate,  throw  aside  all  plain,  pedestrian 
Christian  standards  as  rubbish.  In  the  Rhineland, 
too  .  .  .  But  all  the  central  thought  of  Germany 
has  been  for  a  generation  corrupt.  It  has  been  foul 
with  the  odor  of  desired  shambles/'  And  the  last 
sentences  of  a  dispatch  from  Brussels,  August  fth, 
1914, 

It  is  impossible  not  to  be  with  Belgium  in  the  struggle. 
It  is  impossible  any  longer  to  be  passive.  Germany  has 
thrown  down  a  well-considered  challenge  to  all  the  deepest 
forces  of  our  civilization.  War  is  hell,  but  is  only  a  hell 
of  suffering,  not  a  hell  of  dishonor.  And  through  it,  over 
its  flaming  coals,  Justice  must  walk,  were  it  on  bare  feet. 

So  much  of  statecraft  is  cynical  and  diabolic,  from 
the  standpoint  of  human  decency,  that  many  fine  men 
become  simply  anthropomorphic  about  it  and  hate 
the  state.  The  best  of  Irishmen,  "  agin'  the  gov- 
er'ment,"  have  inclined  to  this  view.  Since  time  be- 
gan, if  evolution  means  anything,  the  resistance  of 
order  to  liberty  has  been  resolute,  with  order  ever 
tending  to  make  liberty  glamourous,  to  handicap  le- 
gitimate growth  and  change,  to  skim  power  from  the 
men  who  create  it,  to  levy  tribute  as  a  toll  on  mere 
existence,  to  cheat  the  bees  of  their  honey.  There 
is  nothing  diabolic  in  statecraft,  I  suppose,  that  isn't 
as  old  as  the  hills.  If  the  conditions  of  "  the  great 

[362  ] 


society"  are  new,  requiring  a  new  outfit  of  political 
devices  for  stimulating  loyalty,  the  game  of  stimu- 
lating loyalty  must  still  be  a  very  old  one,  as  old  as 
any  so-called  "  voluntary  "  movement  on  the  part 
of  any  great  mass.  But  once  the  mass  becomes  very 
vast  and  heterogeneous,  very  extended  and  loose, 
the  artificiality  of  political  devices  shows  up  horri- 
bly, especially  if  their  end  is  warfare  and  their  means 
a  wholesale  employment  of  patriotically  conscripted 
youth. 

To  die  for  a  "  tradition,"  a  "  principle,"  a  "  group 
of  ideas,"  when  your  next-door  neighbors  have  ob- 
viously different  traditions  and  principles  and  groups 
of  ideas  —  it  is  a  requirement  that  goes  astonishingly 
and  absurdly  contrary  to  the  whole  private  tendency 
of  modern  times.  Perhaps  that  tendency,  which  I 
take  to  be  individuation,  has  only  been  superficial  — 
a  matter  of  numbered  seats  instead  of  a  scramble, 
individual  newspapers  instead  of  a  bellman,  multiple 
forks  and  knives,  personal  books,  personal  rooms, 
personal  bath-tubs,  personal  locomotives,  personal 
inflections  in  everything  physical,  rather  than  a  genu- 
ine intimate  and  scrupulous  consultation  of  personal 
natures  and  wills.  Whether  superficial  or  deep,  it 
has  been  the  dominant  note  of  free  communities  in 
our  generation  —  a  note,  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
recruiting  sergeant,  that  cannot  too  soon  be  quelled. 
To  subdue  personality  and  personal  preference  is 
the  function  of  the  recruiting  sergeant.  To  produce 
a  regiment  is  his  object.  And  if  the  "  noble  cause  " 
is  not  conspicuous  when  he  starts  on  his  mission  — 
well,  as  General  O'Ryan  of  New  York  so  wittily  ob- 
serves, a  "  noble  cause  "  can  be  produced  by  any 
government  at  any  time.  The  individual  may  have 

[  363  ] 


been  pursuing  "  liberty,"  detesting  regimentation. 
Suddenly,  in  the  presence  of  an  enemy,  he  is  called 
upon  to  recognize  the  entity  dictated  by  statecraft, 
to  enlist  or  be  flayed.  His  "  noble  cause  "  may, 
actually,  be  declared  the  very  individuation  and  lib- 
erty he  has  striven  for.  His  first  obligation,  for  all 
that,  is  to  defer  his  dividend  of  self.  He  has  to 
commit  himself,  body  and  bones,  to  the  statecraft 
that  has  so  often  betrayed  him,  and  to  give  up  that 
precious  protestantism  which  made  him  feel  a  sol- 
dier of  life.  He  has  to  espouse  self-sacrifice,  to  ad- 
mit solidarity,  to  pool  his  preferences.  He  has,  in 
other  words,  to  come  in  and  be  good. 

With  this  surrender,  this  mighty  abnegation,  in 
mind,  there  is  a  weight  of  import  in  the  last  words 
that  Kettle  speaks  before  the  veil  descends.  The 
scourge  of  war  he  characterizes. 

When  the  time  comes  to  write  down  in  every  country 
a  plain  record  of  it,  with  its  wounds  and  weariness,  and 
flesh-stabbing,  and  bone-pulverizing,  and  lunatics,  and  rats 
and  lice  and  maggots,  and  all  the  crawling  festerment  of 
battlefields,  two  landmarks  in  human  progress  will  be 
reached.  The  world  will  for  the  first  time  understand  the 
nobility,  beyond  all  phrase,  of  soldiers,  and  it  will  under- 
stand also  the  foulness,  beyond  all  phrase,  of  those  who  com- 
pel them  into  war. 

But  the  bond  of  war  he  emphasizes.  "  The  New 
Army  attested  to  die,  if  need  be,  for  the  public  law  of 
Europe."  And  he  speaks  the  last  word  on  war  aims. 

Either  this  is  on  our  part  a  war  into  which  we  were 
forced  by  aggressive  militarism  ...  or  else  it  is  a  mere 
struggle  for  domination  between  greedy  Powers.  .  .  .  The 
inner  disruption  of  the  Central  Alliance  is  never  very  far 

[  364] 


from  practical  politics.  .  .  .  But  consent  to  the  substitution 
of  "  trade  "  for  "  honor  "  as  our  device,  and  mark  the  malign 
transformation.  .  .  .  The  armies,  to  whatever  new  deflec- 
tion their  inspiration  be  submitted,  will  fight  their  un- 
wavering way  to  victory.  But  it  will  be  a  victory  tainted 
with  ambiguous  and  selfish  ends.  History  will  write  of  us 
that  we  began  nobly,  but  that  our  purpose  corrupted.  The 
Great  War  for  freedom  will  not,  indeed,  have  been  waged 
in  vain;  that  is  already  decided:  but  it  will  have  but  half 
kept  its  promises.  Blood  and  iron  will  have  been  once 
more  established  as  the  veritable  masters  of  men,  and  noth- 
ing will  open  before  the  world  but  a  vista  of  new  wars. 

I  received  a  letter  from  France  this  week  that 
said,  "  Raymond  Asquith  lies  buried  at  Guillamont 
on  the  Somme  on  the  bloodstained  road  to  Bapaume, 
being  killed  August  or  September  about  the  same 
time  and  place  as  Tommy  Kettle  whose  grave  I 
searched  for  but  did  not  find."  From  that  unknown 
grave  I  am  glad  that  Kettle  speaks  in  the  end  not  of 
Belgium,  nor  of  Ireland,  but  of  the  power  of  the 
state,  the  treacheries  of  statecraft,  the  invincible  sig- 
nificance of  war  aims.  His  blood  is  a  pledge  to  de- 
mocracy against  "  the  terrorists  of  '  patriotism,'  " 
his  last  courage  a  moral  courage  in  the  name  of  the 
great  liberalism  for  which  he  died. 

December  29, 


[  365  1 


THE  BOOKS  AND  PLAYS 

STUART  P.  SHERMAN:  On  Contemporary  Literature 
ALEXANDER  HARVEY:  William  Dean  Howells 
EDITH  WHARTON:  Xingu  and  other  stories 

Summer 
WINSTON   CHURCHILL:    The   Dwelling  Place  of 

Light 
SHERWOOD  ANDERSON  :  Windy  McPherson's  Son. 

Marching  Men 

GEORGE  MEREDITH  :  Celt  and  Saxon 
HENRY  JAMES:  The  Finer  Grain 

The  American  Scene 
SAMUEL  BUTLER:  The  Way  of  All  Flesh 

The  Note  Books 
H.  G.  WELLS:  Tono-Bungay 

The  New  Machiavelli 
The  Research  Magnificent 
Mr.  Britl'mg  Sees  it  Through 
The  Soul  of  a  Bishop 
ARNOLD  BENNETT:  The  Old  Wives' Tale 
Clayhanger 
These  Twain 
JAMES  JOYCE:  A  Portrait  of  the  Artist  as  a  Young 

Man 

LEO  TOLSTOY:  War  and  Peace 
FEDOR  DOSTOEVSKY:  Crime  and  Punishment 
JOHN  SYNGE :  Poems  and  Translations 

[  366  ] 


'G.  B.  SHAW:  Getting  Married 

Misalliance 
J.  M.  BARRIE  :  A  Kiss  for  Cinderella 

Short  Plays 

RACHEL  CROTHERS:  Old  Lady  31 
O'HiGGiNS  AND  FORD  :  Mr.  Lazarus 
CLARE  KUMMER:  Good  Gracious  Annabelle 
RIDGELY  TORRENCE  :  Negro  Plays 
RUPERT  BROOKE  :  Letters  from  America 

Collected  Poems 

VACHEL  LINDSAY  :  A  Handy  Guide  to  Beggars 
EDGAR  LEE  MASTERS  :  Songs  and  Satires 
CARL  SANDBURG  :  Chicago  Poems 
MAURICE  MAETERLINCK  :  The  Wrack  of  the  Storm 
MAX  EASTMAN  :  Understanding  Germany 
BERTRAND  RUSSELL:  Why  Men  Fight 
RALPH  BARTON  PERRY:  The  Free  Man  and  the 

Soldier 

THORSTEIN  VEBLEN  :  The  Nature  of  Peace 
HENRI  BARBUSSE  :  Under  Fire 
T.  M.  KETTLE:  The  Ways  of  War 


I  am  indebted  to  Mr.  Herbert  Croly  of  The  New 
Republic  and  Mr.  Julian  Mason  of  The  Chicago  Eve- 
ning Post  for  their  kind  permission  to  reprint  these 
articles;  and  to  Mr.  John  Macrae  of  E.  P.  Button 
&  Co.,  for  letting  me  use  my  introduction  to  Samuel 
Butler's  Note-Books. 


[368] 


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